The expert is alarming for people locked up at home: “We need a home psychologist”

“More and more frequently we see people, often young people, who tend to shut themselves up at home, even in their own rooms: they cut ties with the world, with sociality, refuse to enter the world, by which they in turn feel rejected. cases, home intervention is often the only way to offer listening and help. ”This is stated by Fabio Tognassi, psychologist, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, member of the team of Jonas Onlus Milano and clinical manager of the active Home Psychological Assistance (Apd) service on Milan and its province. The closure to sociality, growing due to the isolation imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, “is a new symptom of our time”, continues Tognassi. The Apd service – which sees the associations involved in a transversal manner and the professionals of Jonas for adults, Telemaco for adolescents and Gianburrasca for children, coordinated by Francesca D’Oronzio – breaks the classical schemes of psychoanalysis, in which the p willing to go to the analyst. In this case, it is the psychologists who go to the home of those who experience malaise and suffering due to a situation of stalemate and closure to the world. The need to meet these people in their home context is due to two main reasons: “the first – explains Tognassi – concerns those situations in which psychic suffering is so high as to make the patient feel the need for a greater presence of the psychologist in the his everyday life, to help him get his life back in motion. The same also applies to cases where standard psychological intervention is not sufficient, for example in the field of intellectual and physical disability. these, new forms of suffering have been added linked to social withdrawal “increased by the pandemic. In psychological work,” we bet on the real encounter between people – Tognassi underlines -. We go to their home, around with them, we organize activities together with them, helping them to come out of their defensive isolation. “In this regard, the group of experts does not have” too many problems in breaking the ‘sacredness’ of the psychoanalytic setting. a – adds the head of the Apd – has always been our social mission: to get psychoanalysis out of the private studies of analysts, putting them in relationship with the life and social needs of the city. Since the invention of Jonas and Recalcati, psychoanalysis is no longer an elitist therapeutic practice ”. For this reason too, “economic difficulties – he adds – must not be the reason why a patient cannot access psychoanalytic treatment. Today in Jonas we also have patients who pay a symbolic amount for a session “. When” you feel the feeling that you can’t do it alone, you can ask for help “, remembers Tognassi, who invites you to contact the Apd service , indicated on the site https://www.jonasitalia.it/apd/. Shutting oneself up at home, being alone, with the illusion of feeling protected, ends up isolating people: this is why the psychologist goes home. “Nobody saves himself alone – concludes the psychotherapist -. This is one of the great lessons that recent world events (the pandemic, the war …) are teaching us. Our life, as well as happiness, mental health, depend on the quality of our social bonds, on the attention, care, solidarity with which we nourish them. Of course, the world can be very scary, it is useless to deny it, but together it is possible to find the courage to inhabit it ”.