Her research focuses on eight women. Who are these women, how have you chosen them?

The starting point was my great-grandmother. He was admitted in 1935 and remained in the psychiatric ward until 1986. The research base had to be broadened, but it was clear that he did not want to lose that “micro” view. I worked on a psychiatric archive. The first stories were from 1937 and from that year to 1950 I chose seven… Why those seven? I would have to reasonably justify the judgment because the academy asks me to do so, but as I read it I chose those who created something in me. It was clear that they would be women, because I thought it was important to look at those cases from the feminist point of view that I was working on.

He has studied psychiatry and psychiatry at a given time, Franco's. What are the peculiarities of psychiatry at that time?

I think we need to change the point of view of psychiatry. In fact, in the psychiatry that was applied, the political and social situation in the Spanish State was very influential. And today it is. The characteristics of psychiatry eventually coincided with those of Franco. In many cases, psychiatry was very biologicist, that is, the disease that existed in the body, but, due to the strength of Catholicism, it also influenced morality. Medicine and psychiatry seem to us to be separate from society, but they're not, they're absolutely conditioned.

In addition, psychiatry was often welfare institutions, and many were created by religious associations. This affected not only the treatment being done there, but also the diagnoses being made. If you see them, the psychiatric treaties of that time are absolutely conditioned. Morality and Catholicism were the pillars of medicine.

Was psychiatry therefore an instrument for compliance with the rules?

It was true. When I started studying the case of Birramona, for other reasons, I resorted to written texts in other countries, something that has been very little studied here, especially from a gender point of view. I realized that what appeared in the texts about crazy or crazy was a brilliant male insane. They had a romantic idea. In this regard, it seemed important to me to study women. Seeing stories is important, because theory is one thing, but when you see the stories of women and also read the same women, you realize to what extent what society commands influences their attitude, their problems, their concerns… and you realize that those who step out of the role marked by society consider themselves sick.

Now, when we look back and study those years, we say “look, think, these people were in the same place as epileptics…”. But it’s a question I ask many times, will we look at 2017 in 2050, and say “look, think…”? Psychiatry is closely related to the current situation. In the cases I've looked at, the main problem of about 90 percent was guilt. And they felt guilty about not bearing motherhood as society demanded, of having a sexual desire... for not properly fulfilling the role of woman.

The title of the thesis mentions the subgenre and Antibiotics is another important concept of their work.

The technique proposed by anthropologist Ignasi Terradas is antibiography. He wrote a book about Eliza Kendall, a worker who threw himself into the river when capitalism was almost at its most violent time. The reference to this woman appears only in a note at the foot of a book. Based on this, Terradas suggests writing about a person who has no data, working on his/her antibiogram, which society wants to hide, because the margins give us information about the core of that society. My great-grandmother was the starting point, and the Birramone was the taboo in the family, no one was talking about it, no one was asking, so the challenge was to create a story about a person who barely has information.

On the other hand, nowadays, memory is an instrument that is governed by the norms of society. I use the subtype, because it doesn't have the characteristics of memory, something other than memory.

He has also worked in a modern psychiatric hospital. What did you intend to achieve?

I realized as I went through the research, thanks to many letters I found in the file… The letters you saw many times in the reports the rangers without sending them. Also the letters sent to them. I don't know if they were picked up and kept immediately or after being given to read them. They used them to know how that person actually was.

I realized that the way of writing and the use of the page were not common. Some cards were written horizontally and then vertically above; or the page was filled in another way, or the unfinished phrases… That made me see that I was trying to write madly in a very rational way, to make an academic text. It was to get away and I wanted to be as close as possible. Because in anthropology we do fieldwork, I don't know how many months I spend with them. We also did a voluntary literature workshop, in which we read and wrote, and in which I also employed those who wrote there.