Resilience and empathy they are concepts that do not originate in the field of mental health but increasingly cross it. Volunteers who engage or intend to engage in supporting people suffering from mental disorders must know and understand them thoroughly.
“Resilience as a mental health tool” is the title of the fourth meeting of ours training course, conducted by the psychiatrist Jose Mannu, long-time collaborator of Don Luigi Di Liegro.
First a bit of history, starting from the last part of the 18th century, when the hypothesis made its way in France and Great Britain that "madness" should always be considered "partial" and as such treatable with a “moral treatment” re-education of the healthy part of the person, accompanied by constrictive and punitive methods.
During the Second World War the theme of “partial madness” is reworked: to fight the sick part you have to ally yourself with the healthy one and you have to do it together, in a therapeutic community different from the mental hospital, conceptually non-constrictive and punitive.
A few decades later, in Italy Franco Basaglia starts from the observation that any place built to cure mental illness becomes chronic, to begin the path that will lead to the closure of mental hospitals, to the opening to the territory and to civil society, to law 180. Territorialization is a radical change that requires a profound cultural change.
In the new millennium the awareness of the importance of the link between the individual and the social context is strengthening. There is no need for dedicated "places", any man lives on relationships. Taking care of a person does not mean "curing" them, but supporting their ability to take care of themselves, helping them to develop their potential – that everyone has – to support its functioning within society. The basis of its resilience.
To get to this you need to first identify the real need, listen, clarify, understand, suspend judgement giving up looking for the causes, maintaining empathy with others within the right limits, avoiding risky thoughts that can appear such as "I don't need anyone, but others need me".
The story of a vulnerable person does not include autonomy because everyone's life is a progressive distribution of dependencies (from parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, emotional ties, etc.). The human being and his brain develop according to the relationships built over time, the more distributed the dependence is, the more autonomous one is. We need to change the way we think. We are not able to restore normality but we can expand it, so that there is space to live with the problem that everyone - without exception - carries with them. This is healing.
