When I heard the news that the new building of the Clinic for Psychiatry was officially opened in Podgorica, I felt a punch in my stomach. It was as if someone had pumped all the air out of me and pumped in social progress instead. As wonderful as said progress was, its sudden occurrence created pressure. And now I'm writing, unsure that I'll be able to convey the good intention that drives me, on the verge of depression that I can't even explain, let alone justify in this solemn moment.
Once upon a time, I visited a shack in Kruševac, where a psychiatrist stamped on me. In the corridor, I saw a patient muttering some sacred syllable and looking at the yellow reflection of the sun on the pathos. I remember clearly, January was feeding whiteness to several mated pajamas in that corridor. Everything I saw corresponded to a neglected society where madness is not treated but hidden.
Why am I writing about it now, when we got a new building, a big concrete structure for all our lonely madnesses and refined fears. Why, as a potential consumer of that medical institution, as a candidate for insanity, does an unusual melancholy appear in the moment of state jubilation and red ribbons.
A similar bout of shortness of breath hit me when the first Montenegrin opera was produced, around the time of the referendum. What mattress opera will we have, isn't it late and impolite to create the first opera in the 21st century?! Isn't it better to brand Montenegro as a country without opera, I thought, as I am now sinfully asking - if it is not too late? How will we, who have not had a mental hospital building for so long, suddenly fill the huge void that its absence has left in every corner of this small community?
I am happy to finally see a decent psychiatry, but the building is not enough, it is only a skeleton of something that has yet to be reached. And how far behind we are, it makes me sick even to think... These days, I have in front of me a book of paintings by the Croatian psychiatrist Robert Torre, who worked with alcoholics, drug addicts, and gamblers all his life, but also left an artistic oeuvre of thoughtful and humanistic painting. Every second page of Torre's monograph has a picture, along with a quote from an interview or his book "Is there life before death". Everything here overflows with a luxurious, almost criminal and transgressive abundance of spirit that turns the majesty of all the buildings of this world into smallness.
We need people, because without dedicated people who burn with passion, white walls are in vain. Torre, for example, created pictograms for his department, hand-painted signs for the dining room, fire escapes, reading room, etc. A strange doctor, painter, naive and expert, individual and archer, this is what fills buildings from the inside, what works as medicine , as a drug and salvation. And this has been suffocated, trampled and run over in Montenegro for decades by the commissar selection, so much so that in an attack of despondent fear, the building itself does not give me a guarantee, even when I am looking forward to it the most.
I hope that the doctors who worked outside the standards for so long are not permanently marked by that humiliating experience. The attitude towards mental health in Montenegro is their responsibility. There is still a delayed, difficult and by all accounts uncertain struggle for the state of mind of a divided nation, psychotically divided into political porn, jagma and superstition.
Dedicated talents like Torre's are certainly realized more easily in communities that built their clinics long ago. Decades, hundreds of years of practice and creative commotion cannot be joked around overnight. One "click" will not solve the pain of a country devastated so much that in anno domini 2024 it gets a building for a clinic for mental illnesses.
The hatred that seeps into the public space is a symptom of carelessness and decades of suppression of psychological problems. The biggest problem of our small society is the fear of communication, which leads to attack and hatred. It starts in the family, swims through the tribe and is established in the school. Fear is then used as a political stamp, in order to build on it a separate field of action in which the worst come to the fore. That selection rules especially on the Internet, powered by a cold algorithm that cuts deep into disease as a source of income. Hence the feeling that on News portals, in comment sections, we stare at the collective disorder and the dark heart of psychosis.
But okay, here's a good place to stop. Let it be a happy building, we will need it, we will need it very much.
Bonus video:
