Since 4 October, the “Mental Complement Week” has been held throughout France, a campaign that aims to make society aware of mental illnesses and to ensure that the rights of prisoners who suffer from them are more or less respected. The good thing, of course, is that the mental complement becomes a social wakefulness to calm fears and encourage support for bees. In the educational centers we integrate mentally ill students, who have become normal in the classes due to the need to have their companion. In recent years, movie or solo overnight stays have been organized here or there with a mental complement. Also in an official study aimed at a broad public in this Basque Country, the reflection on psychological illness has recently appeared as a subject of written reflection. And how can we not talk about the fact that in the world of sport this issue has come out of silence, with what happened to Simone Biles.

In Bizkitarte, it seems to me that it is not enough to clarify or educate the fine society in that department: it is necessary not to establish it, but I believe that in relation to mental illness the rejection of the thin society cannot be imposed. I think simple people are willing to take care of what's wrong, to help them take care of it, offering warmth. On the contrary, States, under the pressure of big industries, impose social behaviors that promote and aggravate mental illnesses, regardless of whether they want or not; we have internalized physical or “social” distancing; we are increasingly reluctant to talk to a stranger; we consider that virtual relations are more real than real; we assume that the most intimate emotions that make up our society are quantifiable numerically ... We are immersed in the cold universe of numbers – the poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of the “dictatorship of numbers” – and we should remain so in the society erected, decreasing this week of the “mental complement” in patients more than we do. As you know, the geek that from Silicon Valley program us our ways of life through social media are frankly associative, very good in their field of work, but in great difficulties in real human interaction. And we should build them in society by taking care of our “mental complement.” What hypocrisy.

Has it appeared recently in the French translation Andrija Mati? The Serbian novel Burn-out (translated by Alain Cappon, in the editorial Serge Safran). The writer, a professor of English and American literature, narrates the life of a university professor of literature in memory of the Austro-Hungarian expressionist poet Georg Tragqul. All the personal and professional ideals of the protagonist are destroyed individually: it persists in a corrupt environment, in an adverse context in which diplomas and titles can only be obtained money, with the Kafkaesque administration behind the back. Basically, he decides to commit suicide (burn out, in the first sense) as if it were an admirable artistic action.

For Guhaurk not to burn, to somehow avoid the wave of quantification and virtuality, we need other ways of life: teachers, educators and nurses, direct contact with people; citizens, links with neighborhoods and migrants; art, literature, music or plastic arts amateurs. For it is too early to burn us into incurable despair; there are still people and beauty: I feel every day an enthusiasm for life in the youth. & '97; If we have gone out of stone for them before, above all the walls!