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More poetry and less Prozac

03/07/2022

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ABC

Manuel Casado Velarde

Full Professor of the University

Rare is the day when psychotropic drugs, by defect or excess, are not the protagonist of some news item. "Doparse para vivir: España se refugia en los ansiolíticos", was the degree scroll of a report in this ABC newspaper. More recently, the dubious success that Spain had conquered the first place in the world in the consumption of drugs to treat anxiety and insomnia was headline news. A degree scroll with which it has dethroned the United States, which had been in the lead for years. The Organization of Consumers and Users (OCU) has denounced, once again, the alarming data on the use of benzodiazepine in Spain, a therapeutic tool , apparently of elusive effectiveness and not free of side effects and risks of generating dependence.

The increase in the use of anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives in recent times certainly does not rule out the precarious public health system, the lack of mental health specialists or, more recently, the covid-19 pandemic. However, the growing proliferation of the use of such substances is nothing new. For decades, we have been witnessing a hypermedicalization of suffering and anxiety, treating them with prescriptions for antidepressants, when such emotional situations may be, if not inevitable, normal experiences of life.

It is a fact that the intensive offer of entertainment is sample unable to fill the feeling of existential emptiness and vertigo of many lives. What's more, it sometimes exacerbates it, due to the stress it provokes; a feeling of dizziness that movements such as the slow down or the so-called mindfulness try to placate or counteract.

Without a correct diagnosis of the cause, however, it is difficult to tackle the evil. The most radical destitution that can afflict a person is the lack of meaning in life, wrote Viktor Frankl after the experience of the Nazi camps of Auschwitz and Dachau in his book Man's Search for Meaning (1946), which, incredibly, is still among the best sellers. But, as Václav Havel pointed out, "the tragedy of modern man lies not in the fact that he is increasingly unaware of the meaning of his life, but in the fact that he is less and less concerned about it". Today the cynicism prevails in thinking that, since we have fallen into the mousetrap, we are going to eat the cheese (Landero).

And here come, like a ring to the finger, the not inconsiderable help of poetry and, in general, of the great literature of all times. I love literature," writes Todorov, "because it makes me live.
because financial aid helps me to live. Literature, denser and more eloquent than everyday life, broadens our universe, invites us to imagine other ways of conceiving and organizing it. It opens up to infinity the possibility of interaction with others, and thus enriches us infinitely. It offers us irreplaceable sensations that make the real world more meaningful and beautiful. It allows us all to respond better to our vocation as human beings".

Literature, in fact, allows to understand the human condition and to harmonize the being of the readers. The function of catharsis in Greek tragedy was no different: with the "beautiful word" the aim was to purify the spectator of his own low passions, seeing them projected in the characters of the play. And "the good order of the soul -writes Laín Entralgo in his essay La curación por la palabra en la antigüedad clásica- always has beneficial corporal consequences. The action of the word is so intense that it operates as if the speech itself were a true medicine". Literature can thus speak to the deepest human needs.
human needs. Gabriel Celaya was right: "Poetry is necessary / like daily bread". Paraphrasing the poet from Hernani, we can recognize that poetry is a drug loaded with future.
of the future.

With its call to contemplation, poetry has something of its own to contribute to the discovery of meaning; or, at least, to stop and think in the midst of the whirlwind of this civilization of spectacle (Vargas Llosa).
civilization of the spectacle (Vargas Llosa). "A first act of resistance," writes the French philosopher and politician Bellamy, "consists in reconnecting with language, in protecting the semantic power of words. We have to recover together the sense of the real and for that we have to recover together the sense of words. This is as much as to say that the true political urgency is, in reality, poetic".

Without a strong anchor in the real, without confidence that there can be something solid to lean on, human existence becomes insecure, at the mercy of countless uncertainties and perplexities.
perplexities. As the British psychiatrist Wilfred R. Bion states, "truth is essential to psychic health". Moreover, according to Kafka, "truth is what every man needs in order to live. Life without truth is not possible. Perhaps truth is life itself.

In the splintered and torn world in which we live, "accustomed to the broken reason of Postmodernity, we understand with difficulty that poetry, science and Philosophy were originally one and the same thing -writes the poet Juan Antonio González Iglesias-. The ancient world is a trusting world. It trusts that things make sense. The yearning of ancient poetry is the same as that of science".

José Hierro saw poetic activity as "the scarring task / of healing with new words / old wounds". In the words of Novalis, "poetry heals the wounds that reason inflicts". Poetry, in short, makes us less dependent on the ephemeral stimuli of addictive entertainment or the compulsive resource to chemical remedies. "A book with life has an unimaginable power of healing. There are books that are like mountain shelters or oxygen bottles. Portable pharmacies" (Jesús Montiel).

Manuel Casado Velarde, Full Professor of the University, is the author of the book Más poesía y menos Prozac, Madrid, Breves Rialp.