Soffro dunque siamo. Il disagio psichico nella società degli individui

«A brilliant title, Soffro dunque siamo (I Suffer, Therefore We Are), that refers to what I found in my experience: which is that currently there is no other way to speak with a young collectivity than referring to the mental suffering.»

Franco Berardi

A lucid exploration in the psychological uneasiness as a social phenomenon, that concerns all of us. And as an inevitable consequence of the post-capitalistic ideology, in which the logic performance and performativity have definitely supplanted the individual and his harmonious growth. It has been said that depression is the disease of the twenty-first century. By 2030, after the cardiovascular diseases, depression will be the psychopathology responsible for the loss of the highest number of years of active life, and already today the anti-depressive drugs represent one of he principle components of the public pharmacological expense. But there isn’t only depression. There are emerging forms of psychological uneasiness that weren’t so relevant in the psychopathology of the 90’s: disturbances of panic, borderline disturbances, obsessive-compulsive disturbances, anorexia, bulimia, phenomena of social withdrawal. This “infection”, to which the pandemic has been as another multiplier, tells us something of important about its tendency to privatize the psychological uneasiness, transforming it in the fruit of a ill cerebral machine to be repaired and so forgetting the relational nature, and political, of the mind. Through a lucid and field investigation, centered on the direct testimonials of those who have been swept up and those who every day try to understand and cure it, Marco Rovelli narrates the disasters of the hyper-modern and neo-liberal civilization which has taken a definitive form in the 80’s under the Thatcherian motto: “Society doesn’t exist. Only individuals exist”. And he strives in suggesting alternative paths, of sharing and salvation, hoping that they will be tracked as soon as possible.

«Marco Rovelli insists, persists, resists. He looks for stories, protects them, finds them, sifts them. In short, every book of his is sweat and momentum.»

Roberto Saviano