28 Living the dialogue
We met the Foundation in 2006, during the “3rd Catalan Congress on Mental Health.” At that time, Nikosia was warmly and courageously welcomed as a means of communication and as a space/context from which to re-problematize those issues that had been raised in conferences and panel discussions. The radio was set up in the hallways, and the speakers would come over, dialogue, and analyze what had been said in the auditorium in response to the questions and attentive gaze of people who, among other things, had been living with a mental health issue for several years. It was another space; the audience gradually drew closer, and during the coffee break, over cortados and canapés, what had been on the periphery began to take on a humble centrality. Above all, as a forum for debate within the congress, it was fertile ground for the collective construction of thought, allowing ideas to be explored from a horizontal, honest, and innovative perspective. It was perhaps, at the same time, one of those occasions when the idea began to take hold in Catalonia that knowledge produced with people experiencing diagnosed mental distress could become part of the possible discourses and dialogues on mental health. For Nikosia and its editors, that congress was a foundational moment where becoming aware of the opportunities for political-social intervention and participation that opened up through radio and collective thought was the opening to a possible horizon in which they could stop being objects of intervention by “others” and become active subjects in the process of building their own recovery paths.
Since that day until today, there have been numerous encounters and dialogues with the people who make up the Foundation. The graduate programs, conferences, and shared initiatives have enriched the field of reflection on health, always understood as a multidimensional issue. Perhaps that is why we think of the Foundation as a space and territory of intersections, of crossroads and bonds woven over the years. Like a moving idea that, as they often say in Trieste, never stops questioning and questioning itself to stay alive, dynamic, and active. It is a sphere of encounters that advocate for a stance attentive to the complexity of the phenomenon of mental health and that therefore begins with the need to understand transdisciplinary work as a constitutive element of all thought and practice. Perhaps the Foundation is one of those few spaces where this very idea of the transdisciplinary is not just a declaration of intent or empty rhetoric, but a commitment to thinking about health from an ethical-political, quasi-militant approach, in relation to the collectives and people alongside whom practices and care are developed.
Today we know more than ever that it can be illusory and fallacious to attempt to address the tangled reality of the suffering that surrounds us from a single frame of reference or from the solitary epistemological field of the discipline that initially supports and sustains each of us. The Foundation has been at the forefront of the need to develop a constant agora, a common instance for cross-disciplinary production to better approach the phenomena of affliction. Disciplines are constructs that sometimes run the risk of being articulated from a certain omnipotence that denies within itself the possibility of achieving results attentive to complexity; and the Foundation's germinal and constant idea has been and is, in our view, to always generate a territory for intersections, for the production of that which results from the shared, the co-created. This does not imply, of course, diluting disciplines or ignoring their singularities and specific contributions, but rather becoming aware that the ultimate reality of psychic suffering also requires what emerges from the fusion of different fields of knowledge. This fundamentally includes what results from lay knowledge, first-person experience, their ways of conceptualizing suffering, and their strategies for self-care and caregiving. The Foundation, in each of its actions, understands this transdisciplinarity as a moment/instance of mutual resonances, of the collective production of new meanings. This is one of the key ideas that we also share from Nikosia and in the proposals of Collective Mental Health. Alicia Stolkiner gives us more clues to understand the idea through the metaphor of the orchestra:
“Perhaps a metaphor will help explain this: the symphony orchestra, in which each instrument has its own specificity, its technique, and its separate rehearsals. If we arrive before the concert begins, we will hear an inharmonic polyphony. However, when the symphony starts, it is one. A single product that, nonetheless, contains the diversity of sounds from each instrument in a way that cannot be explained by simple addition. If we were to replace the instruments with disciplines, the symphony—that single symphony, that unity which disappears as soon as the performance ends—would be the transdisciplinary. This transdisciplinary moment would be, for example, the product of research on a problem defined conceptually in an interdisciplinary way, or the strategy proposed by a care team in response to a specific situation. It is a situation in continuous construction, not a state. The tension between differentiation and integration is never fully resolved and reappears with every problem to be addressed.” (Stolkiner A. 1999) [1]
The Foundation is one of the first entities to understand, apply, and work with this perspective. The results are evident. We thank them from here for their trust, their generosity, and their human and epistemological openness. Their constant commitment and courage in opening spaces for convergence. We are together on this path. We continue together.
Infinite thanks also to each and every one of the people who have made the Foundation's task and transformative insistence possible, an insistence that continues to contribute essentially to building a more just, kind, and attentive society to the complexity of the world we live in.
Congratulations on these 20 years of building bridges, opening possibilities, and fostering dialogue. We feel at home here.
Sincerely.
[1] Article published in Revista EL CAMPO Psi, April – 1999, Buenos Aires, Argentina http://www.campopsi.com.ar