This is my personal experience in four years of mountain therapy and thirty years of anxiolytics, antidepressants, sleeping tablets and painkillers: about the visit to Pescasseroli and not to Santiago de Compostela, Lourdes or other desirable place "outside the CIM walls".
Mountain Therapy: For those who still do not know what it is, and would like to know more about it and what and who it is for, whether it works or not and how effectively it works or could work if improved.
This "discipline" was born in France and adopted by the Italians of Trento. It forms part of the practices of re-education and re-entry into "civil" life for those who are already in psychotherapeutic treatment, for a variety of reasons.
Well then is it beneficial? I think yes, but it needs to be improved in the way it is organised. In Rome there aren't any mountains. So like Mohammed, the patients must go to the mountains.
There is a need to plan a program of trips during the year. There is a need to decide on viable destinations, where to stay (and stay well) to make reservations, arrange transportation, plan therapy techniques with the mountain and 'brotherly love.
The operators report that the budgets for mountain therapy trips are scarce but we the patients do not see the published budgets, nor are we involved or consulted about the projects proposed for our benefit. Do the opinions and considerations of the patients count or is this issue "off limits"?
As patients, we should be able verify that which concerns us. Shouldn't we cooperate, interact and participate together in the design of the projects aimed, together with supportive therapies, at our recovery?
Are we patients or hostages?
The operators of the group for psychotherapy and hiking in mid altitude mountains, at the CIM in Via Giorgio Morandi had good kind ways. We were happy both for them and for us. It's their duty to be so. Hopefully they continue to be even more kind. It will be good for the health of both the patients and themselves and it will improve the service.
For the rest I have to admit that I had a good experience in the mountains with them only once in four years. It was a four day trip. There was time for the senses to get in balance with the environment: the smell, the contact with plants, rocks, with the sound of the stream. This all helped us to want to socialize with each other.
On the otherhand I had a bad, very bad, experience, in the various hit and run trips in a single day, more often with spartan or rickety rather than appropriate transport, traffic jams and stressing dashes along the motorway; trips that were only tiring, the memory of the mountain blurred by aches.
Exhausting hit and run trips ahould be avoided. How many times I have told the operators, amongst other real, tangible things, but they did not want to hear. Not because they are brilliant but because they do not recognize the need to adapt to input from the patients who are the beneficiaries of the services.
Who are the funds for? Who are the projects for?
Maybe for the career of the operators rather than for the recovery of the patients?
The first time that I went with the group to Pescasseroli, I felt the fascination and the therapy of the mountain environment and of the welcome in good conditions and the good behaviour of the operators who did their duty in a satisfactory way. That time they took loving and responsible care of the patients entrusted to them (ie us) and these thanks I owe both to the mountains and to all of us in the group just like new-found good family. The patients, men and women, together with the operators and the nurse who was really kind. Duty aside, I think that it was also more pleasant for the operators and the nurse to do their job in the mountains rather than closed in the CIM.
What I did not like at all was that there were many sorcerer's apprentices of psychiatry and psychology and "photography" that were not part of our group. They had an agreement with our operators (without our knowledge) to take multiple, almost manic, photos of us during mountain therapy. These photographic voyeurs had the male and female patients in mountain therapy as their subjects. They filmed and photographed constantly during the excursions. I didn't like this at all, I felt humiliated, used and deceived. They photographed us as if we were animals at the zoo. A real lack of respect, a deplorable absence of style and an insult to professional ethics and the dignity of patients in mountain therapy.
My elogy to mountain therapy is above all for us as a group to the patients and the nature, the environment and the brotherhood, and sense of friendship, love that's not bought and sold (something rare in psychiatry and psychology).
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