Patrick McGrath
Follia

Patrick McGrath's "Asylum" was released in Italy in 1998 and achieved immediate success. Today, it is used in clinical psychology studies, and thanks to word of mouth on the internet, it finds new life. After all, the theme addressed is femicide.

Set in 1959 in a Victorian psychiatric hospital. The asylum is still an infernal place, pharmacology is mild, and patients are often abandoned to their fate. The novel manages to perfectly explain what happens in the minds of the protagonists who, now victims, now perpetrators, swirl in a continuous vortex.

The story is narrated by Dr. Peter, the psychiatrist of the facility and secretly in love with Stella, the frustrated and unhappy wife of one of his subordinates, Max.

One of the most severe patients is Edgar, a violent uxoricide, obsessed with abandonment and the control of attractive women like his ex-wife. Edgar is a handsome and cursed man. A restless and psychotic artist.

Edgar and Stella meet during a party and, during a dance, fall madly in love with a pathological and all-consuming love that overwhelms everything and everyone.

She, Stella, is the protagonist and mirror of a madness that eventually becomes collective, the opposite of the female archetype of mother and wife.

The author's descriptive power is incredibly effective in bringing us to almost visual and tactile sensations, as in the terrible scene of the son's death.

Psychology is still a young science and, despite its 200 years, fails to keep up with the times. There are too many social and cultural changes in the world and fields of action.

Today, from a diagnostic point of view, there is a manual, the DSM-5, developed in the United States. A classification system that attempts to divide mental illnesses into diagnostic categories based on the description of symptoms (i.e., the expressive and behavioral modes of individuals as a reflection of their own thoughts and emotions).

With the failure of psychoanalysis, new "faster" treatment methods have spread today, more in tune with the times, but it is not enough.

The most widespread method is cognitive-behavioral, but the pharmacological frontier is so advanced that many disorders can often be treated without hospitalization, by following regular psychotherapy.

Art has made its great contribution to psychology, to the point that, today, artistic paths are often organized within reception areas for psychiatric patients or those with psychological problems. Music, painting, and theater are tools to help reprocess many disorders or situations with dignity.