Two Small Islands of Light

How do you describe something beautiful you've witnessed?
It happened in a psychiatric hospital: 650 patients, men and women.
Yes, psychiatric hospitals still exist. Even though a law decreed their abolition and their names were struck from the doors. That legal stroke of the pen didn't magically restore health to everyone suffering from mental illness, or give them families and communities ready to welcome them back.
In this unnamed park—well-maintained but empty of life, surrounded by sturdy pavilions wrapped in silence—we discovered two small islands of light. I call them light because that's what I saw on the faces of the women in the embroidery and sewing workshop when they looked up from their work. They were plain-looking, a bit like you'd expect in a nursing home; elderly women whose bodies had grown heavy, sometimes far too heavy, dressed as one dresses when the outside world has abandoned you. But beyond all that, despite their illness—an old and visible companion to each of them—there was life in their eyes. Life that returns when someone looks at you with a human gaze.

The same light shone in the eyes of the men who showed us, with obvious pride, their garden and their rabbits, turkeys, and chickens. They live together. A community in the middle of this small farm! Every day they clean the long trough where the chickens drink—otherwise disease sets in. (Our guide tells us that two years ago all the chickens died.) They handle the essential work of running this little agricultural cooperative.
Perhaps it's only a tiny light. But it makes all the difference against the darkness, against that "dead" stare of someone who merely survives instead of lives. These are seriously ill patients, the doctor accompanying us explains.

In their eyes, life returning when someone looks at them with a human gaze

In their eyes, life returning when someone looks at them with a human gaze
And all because in 1978, the law said psychiatric hospitals should be abolished. So a doctor here in Guidonia made a choice: "If we leave, we leave together. Otherwise I stay with them." How could these men and women leave? They had no homes, no families, no work, no health—and no magical way to find all that overnight. The doctor stayed with them. He decided to rekindle this light in their eyes. It wasn't easy to believe in, but it had to be made possible. And it happened. It still requires tremendous effort today.

When the outside world has abandoned you...

When the outside world has abandoned you...
This means far more than simply believing in each of these men and women. It means:

• convincing the administration;


• listening to each person and calling them by name;


• going to market to buy two roosters;


• fighting to obtain permits and subsidies from public authorities;


• enduring criticism and sometimes sabotage from those who work in the "open facilities";


• holding assemblies with the patients—taking decisions together, as a group;


• handing over the keys to the workshop to each woman because it is *their* workshop, not the doctor's;


• persuading staff to work with this vision of human beings;


• recognizing, with clear eyes, that nothing is worse than emptiness in a human life, and that failing to fill it is a crime;


• inviting the nearby town to celebrate Christmas or Carnival with "the mad";


• treating patient work not as a means of control, but as an opportunity responding to their needs and their capacity for independence and creativity;


• giving Luciano a small flock of sheep so he can take them to pasture in the nearby countryside. (We see him pass beneath the trees with loud cries and grand speeches to his animals);


• understanding that illness cannot be denied, nor can it always be conquered, but that despite it all, a luminous part can be saved in each person.

Wasn't this kind of "human-centered" intervention precisely what Law 180 intended to create?
Aren't these the small communities where desperate parents long to see their tormented child live—free from the weight of carrying everything alone?

- Nicole Schulthes, 1993

Read also: Building the Capacity to Hope (in a Psychiatric Hospital) by Natalia Livi