“I don’t evolve. I am.”
— Pablo Picasso.

Tristano Ajmone’s Biography

Writing a biography that is not merely a sequence of dates and achievements it’s already, in itself, a task not less arduous than trivial.

Trying to piece together my existential biography after having traversed the psychiatric hell it’s almost impossible.

The biography of anyone who has experienced psychiatry is necessarily an incomplete biography — regardless of how he/she decides to classify his/her psychiatric experience.

Psychiatric interventions are aimed at behaviour modification, and for achieving this end psychiatry will not hesitate to resort to psycho-physical destabilization. Every psychiatric course follows a consolidated protocol whose steps grant to channel the patient through its career of «mentally ill». The first step being the acceptance of the stigmatizing label «mentally ill». The refusal to accept this label implies the clinical diagnosis of «anosognosia» (unawareness of illness), a diagnosis to which follows an undetermined protraction in time of the coercive period of «treatment».

My inner-biography revolves around my obstinate refusal to accept the diagnostic iron-branding. At the time in which my psychiatric journey began, I did not imagine how long it was going to last the arm wrestling with the «experts».

Psychiatrists don’t require particular skills in order to protract to infinity the game of «resistance to therapy»: they’ll increase — at every interview session — the tranquilizers dosage — until you’re incapable of reading a book, watching TV, holding a conversation. The only limit to this arm wrestling is the biological one: when the patient’s body is no longer capable of bearing the pharmacological intoxication level (in my case up to the point my nails yellowed), and the patient doesn’t surrender to the threats, the classical manner of handling the embarrassing «therapeutic failure» (and prevent a premature death) is the transferral of the patient to another institute.

The psychiatric inmate’s life is not truly a life, as it is conceived in the free world, rather it’s the spook of a small-scale existence, consumed in an imperfect world engineered ad hoc for people considered to be imperfect. As transferrals sum up, every hold of reference to any micro-reality blurs away, imposing an ever decreasing interest for the feeble world provided by the institutes.

Refusal to comply to rehabilitation and readjustment programs is the highway to safeguarding one’s own identity in face of the psychiatric assaults. There is no inner-evolution along a path traced by «clinical experts» who consider you a biochemical disfunction, as no goal accomplished coercively is ever a conquest.

I have looked inside myself, compared my personality shortcoming with the filth that my cold jailer held in their souls, and at last I decided to remain myself, that I didn’t want their «help», their cruel compassion.

My personal biography has been decontextualized, cracked and devalued. The inner-biography is now misaligned from the exterior one (which has now become merely a colloquial formality). For this reason I will not embark on the impossible task of writing my biography.