JOY SORMAN
To madness
translated by Ariadni Moskhon
ed. Polis, page 269

Key. For everything. He opens the doors of rooms and offices, closets, drawers, a lounge and a patio door leading to the garden to smoke a cigarette. Because everything is locked, open with permission, nothing is open, free, unplanned, allowed. It is a place of confinement, imprisonment, forced stay, treatment or perfect imbalance, a hateful place and at the same time a safe nest. Pavilion 4B of the psychiatric hospital becomes a permanent destination for the writer once a week and for a year.

She observes and writes, she participates subtly and as far as she is allowed, she approaches the sick and they approach her, she is a foreign body and therefore harmless and indifferent, who does not scream, does not take medicine, does not wear blue paper psychiatric pajamas, does not have crises, does not go into isolation, she is not threatened with a syringe that calms, lulls, exhausts.

The author approaches both the side of patients and the side of nurses, social workers, doctors, therapists.

There is a whole world inside the mental hospital. People who are aware that something is wrong and seek or accept help, others who stubbornly deny that their mind does not recognize reality in the way of others, many, those who are not crazy. OUR Sorman controls the entire life of the unit. One by one, patients appear on the pages with emaciated and pale faces, with skin, tattoos or scars from suicide attempts, groomed in their own way or completely abandoned, full of fear and longing, silent or delirious with mock glee in the heat. and crawl into depression and decline in rage. They are united by their lost look, what is left of the chemistry flowing in their blood. Medicines combined and many, doses that are reviewed and changed until the desired is achieved, to be calm, rudimentary functional, not to harm other patients, nurses, doctors, especially themselves.

Living their incurable pain day in and day out, waiting to get out, come home, feel strong and healed, give up medication, and go back to where they might eventually die. Alone, with a single company of voices that only they hear and dictate to them disgusting actions, incredible thoughts, inexplicable actions that bring them to a painful brink.

OUR author he listens, understands, shares with others. Nurses, social workers, doctors, therapists. They live among schizophrenics, psychotics, unbalanced people, forming unstable relationships with them, depending on what they have to face in everyday life, at sessions, trips, trying to understand, help or simply alleviate this inner struggle, pain. what cannot be described, cannot be cured, it only exists.

What breeds insanity? Genetic failure in the brain, severe heredity, terrible childhood trauma? How can even a doctor tell schizophrenia from what it pretends to be in borderline behaviors and states? Why are personnel costs and mental health costs being reduced? Why structures are not enough? Why does the bureaucracy become gigantic in order to crush in turn what is left of these human scoundrels who are fighting themselves to the death? These and many other questions arise in the book, as the author tries to capture the borderline and unknown to many reality, which gives rise to fear and denial.

Psychiatry may be limited to treatment with electric shock, bandaging, use of force. It increased the intake of medicines, allowed the sick to participate in the action and to speak, to express themselves as they can, revealing their deep darkness, too often inaccessible to them.

However, it remained a place of exercise of power, and in the writings of Sorman this is emphasized later. Without prejudices, without stereotypes, with humility and sadness, he describes the cruelty of the universe, which collides with logic, feelings, relationships, in order to leave an ironic and affectionate grimace of the defeated at the end.