There are two types of psychiatrists: those who were trained in a general hospital and those who were trained in an asylum; neither better nor worse, different. Those of us trained in a madhouse are a species to be extinguished like the institutions where we learned the trade, where we dance, play and live from dawn to dusk with madness. The asylums are total institutions where all life passes inside (when I say all, I say all).
Until the advent of psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology, psychiatry had to ally itself with the devil himself to be able to rescue the mentally ill from the well of nowhere and custodial treatment, with all the squalor that it entailed, was the only means at our disposal. Some illustrious advanced people intuited that those institutions had to change, that they had to be humanized in order to break again the chains of madness. One of them was Dr. Cabaleiro Goás, who managed to build the Toén Psychiatric Hospital in Ourense - without a doubt - a beacon of psychiatry that has guided locals and strangers.
Sector psychiatry, community psychiatry, anthropological psychiatry, the first psychopharmacological advances, psychoanalysis, psychodrama, the systemic; also the sculpture by Florencio Darboiro, the painting by Fidel Vidal, the Botany by Rodríguez Gracia, writers, thinkers, the President of Parliament, poets ... Everything exploded in Toén creating a unique school born from the soul of Cabaleiro. The professor's dream was left halfway through and he only managed to open a new pavilion, the rest were embalmed by silvas and toxos without ever being released. Noble auditoriums, shops, workshops and the old abandoned pavilion, with its bars and cells, like an Auschwitz without tourists. Strolling the incendiary evenings of Ourense through La Cochada - where the "Doctor Cabaleiro Góas" Psychiatric Hospital is located - walking through these ruins and silently counting the sticks carved with the nails by the sick on the walls of the isolation cells, was an emotional experience corrective akin to a visit to Auschwitz alone. The news recently broke that the old hospital had been blessed - after years of neglect - with its conversion into the community's comprehensive fire prevention center. I never imagined that this whole scene burned into the hypothalamus would end up being a sophisticated fire station. Seeing that decadence made me feel older, this doesn't make me feel like a calendar firefighter. After all, both destinations serve the community, they saved and will save many lives and their officials are aid professionals, often heroically. A fertile psychiatric school came out of Toén and I hope that the most outstanding firefighters will emerge.
Powder will be, more grateful powder. DEP "Your relatives."
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