We Two Are One — A Review

Matteo Spicuglia has done remarkable work in We Two Are One, reconstructing the story of Andrea Soldi, a forty-five-year-old man from Turin with schizophrenia who died on August 5, 2015, during an involuntary psychiatric hold. As a journalist assigned to cover the manslaughter trial against the municipal police and medical staff who carried it out, Spicuglia does something far more profound than document courtroom testimony. With extraordinary gentleness, he draws close to Cristina and Renato—Andrea's sister and father—and in doing so restores Soldi to his own story. Because Andrea, before he was crushed by a system incapable (at every level) of relating to mental illness, was a child, a young man, and an adult with his own character, passions and fears, his dreams, the love he gave and received from his family. A family present and fighting, yet left alone to face a devastating illness—made worse by prejudice, institutional failure, and stigma that traps both the sick and those who love them in an inescapable trap. Andrea's story is a stone: hard but genuinely precious.