Thank you, Clusa
This August, Dr. Josep Clusa Matinero, known as Pep to many, passed away.
Psychiatrist Psychoanalyst, some from the Archive knew him on the day of the Presentation Memorial of the Young February 28th of this year.
This news made me feel like I was, once again, orphaned. However, I had been by her side since 1972, the year I started working at the Mental hospital in a women's ward near hers, until her retirement.
As always happens with us, I had many things left unsaid (we were lucky enough to see each other in person before August to show our appreciation once more), which is why I'm taking advantage of this space to communicate them.
I thank you Pep for having accompanied us in one of the most difficult stages we lived through, "The Dismantling of the Holy Cross's Mental" belonging to the Hospital de Sant Pau. Like us, you made the decision to defend the Project of Change and Continuity, which combined psychiatric beds with community services and a hospital for the neighborhood.
I thank you for your strength and enthusiasm in pursuing your dreams and not stopping until you achieve them. (Your insistence was well known to the authorities of Sant Pau, the Diputació, and the Generalitat). You wanted Integrated Psychiatric Services in the neighborhood: Day Center, Club, Special Work Center, Supported Housing, and Psychiatric Residence. And, we achieved it!! But, we lost the beds.
I appreciate your love for the group. You were always a group facilitator: the team group, the room group, the Women's Department group, the Interdepartmental group, the supervision group, the therapeutic group... Additionally, you empowered the Association of Mental Patients and the Association of Mental Health Families.
Your invitation for us to be active in them, to give space to our words, even though more than once they turned against you.
Thank you for teaching us to listen and to listen to each other., Including the unconscious, individual, group, and institutional. To seek dialogue between personal, political, psychiatric trends although at times, proudly assuming your power, you would only push forward.
That you were close both professionally and as an assistantAt the time when we didn't have your resonance, how difficult it was for us to digest it. That, even retired, you continued to consider our encounters as something transcendent, enhancing something so important to you, the emotional bond from our group.
And to finish This could go on forever Thank you for enthusiastically embracing the project of collecting our lived healthcare experience. You left us so soon! You didn't even have time to select your documentation and pass it to the archive and register it. We hope that the bond between those of us who remain will enable us to continue and fill this loneliness.
Mercedes Hidalgo Rebollo
September 2013