Born twice

«I have indelible memories. It was a shock, a punch in the stomach, a lump in the throat». Annibale Crosignani is 90 years old today. In 1968 he was a young psychiatrist who walked through the doors of the former female asylum in via Giulio in Turin for the first time. One of the hells in the city, a place of separation of discomfort from everything else: outside normal life, inside a limbo of suspended rights, where dignity, recalls Crosignani, "was profaned". It is touching to see the intensity of memories so vivid even after 50 years. «I found myself in front of a ward with 160 abandoned women. They lived in a single room. The luckiest worked in the laundry and ironing, all the others spent their time waiting for something that never arrived».

With a paradox. Not all of the internees had mental problems. More than a third were very young girls, with a difficult past or one of poverty: some had run away from home, some had run away from their families, some from an orphanage she had gone straight to the asylum. No hope. Within those walls the theme was not treatment, but containment and separation, with doctors reduced to the role of bureaucrats. «We had to sign, endorse what the company asked for, but I had no intention of working like this. I came from the university clinic, I was prepared, but above all I had the intuition that there was a world to discover in that place».

Annibale Crosignani's revolution started from this spark. Wasn't talking to sick people prudent? He did. Listen to them wasted time? Not for him. Is it risky to go against the rules? Simply necessary.

Like that time, with a patient in her sixties, but with the mind and heart of a child. «That woman lived for her ceramic doll. One day during a quarrel, another sick woman took it, threw it on the floor and shattered it. The woman was in despair because she had lost all of her. She screamed, she cried, she couldn't rest, no one could calm her down. They called me urgently and I decided to take the situation head on. I approached her, looked at her and made her a promise: "If you stop crying, I'll bring you another doll tomorrow". She believed me." Professor Crosignani spent the afternoon looking for a similar doll and finally found it. The next day he took her to her patient. “She calmed down and hugged me. Then she with a bright look she said to me: "But would you play with me now?" I didn't think twice. We sat on the floor like children and played. The nurses, seeing me in that situation, thought I was crazy».

An emblematic story that brought back the value of empathy and the closeness that heals. The road was marked, the wall of incommunicability demolished, a new method finally brought to light. Thus began a battle for civilization which gradually led to the closure of the asylums, the one in via Giulio as early as 1973, five years before the Basaglia law, a point of no return amidst a thousand incomplete works.

For Crosignani, also a definitive life lesson. «Those women allowed me to get to know humanity and the world. Despite their fragility, they had rare qualities: they were more sincere and more authentic than so-called "normal" people. I found myself guarding treasures, learning the meaning of life, of limitations, the fact that we are not omnipotent». A true renaissance! Crosignani's blue gaze narrows, his eyes become clear, but his voice remains firm: «As a psychiatrist I was reborn in that moment. It's as if all those women had given birth to me a second time".


Matteo Spicuglia
NP May 2023