Let me tell you a story.

During the pandemic, thanks to some extra time and resources, I finally gave shape to a project I had in mind for years: staging my impression of a specific aspect of the psychiatric world: coercion.
I do not belong to those suffering from mental illness, but I had an early experience that led me to dig into the matter.


My name is Daniela, but almost everyone calls me Munsha.
This story seems centuries old. It was the 1990s, and I was just a teenager.

I had put aside my classical music studies (later I found out they were only on pause), feeding myself on Rock ‘n’ Roll and cursed poets. I played electric bass and had a couple of bands with whom we occasionally performed in the clubs of a rather bourgeois town in Campania.

I have never been a person of many words – even fewer back then.
When I wasn’t wearing black, green baggy army trousers and a Che Guevara T-shirt were my attire. Audio cassettes instead of nail polish, cigarettes instead of Cola One: these were my investments.

All this in the setting of a Liceo Socio Psico Pedagogico populated almost exclusively by female students.

In there, I was a creature of my own.

And there was this little woman: my humanistics teacher.
Even in her eyes, I was out of place. Not because of the place, but because of who I was. Her attitude towards me was anything but educational, despite the pedagogical orientation of the institute. Today, we would call it „mobbing.”

We were in a subtle conflict – or rather, she was against me, with unfairly low grades and denigration. I swallowed my daily five hours in the classroom, waiting to get back to doing what made sense to me.

Then, one day, this little woman with an enormous megalomania stopped me in the yard on my way out of school.
My fingers were fondling a cigarette that had slipped out of the pack I kept in my pocket; music was already belching from between my collarbones and chin.

In a firm voice with no cadence to a question mark, she asked „What’s wrong with you?”
The usual discomforts a teenager can experience, I thought, but I didn’t tell her.

She got close to me – too close. As usual, she pulled up one corner of her mouth – a bad imitation of Billy Idol – and lifted her chin to impose herself, exercising her authority.
„The problem is in your head, and you make trouble for others. You need to be treated,” she thundered. „I will request the headmaster to have you seen by a psychiatrist.“ To me this sounded like: We will lock you up!

She had threatened me and she did it in the worst way: with an attempt at censorship. Despite her role, she did not try to listen to me or offer me help. No, straight away she brought up psychiatry.
Yes, I had already messed up a bit with my rebellious crap, but it was youthful frustration I had to spit out, not a mental disorder. This episode just increased my anger!
Fortunately, her intimidation did not materialise; I hope it was only because she spoke without thinking.

This one incident, however, gave me food for thought, a lot, and for a long time.
I felt deeply disturbed by that power game in which, if one is fragile, one either loses or escapes by luck (as in my case).
Prompted by this reflection, I began searching for answers to helplessness and existential precariousness; I found only evidence that supported my astonishment, which turned into disillusionment.

I delved into history, letters, archives, medical records, biographies, and scientific texts. I drew from it stories of political, social, racial, gender, or class coercion, private interests, poverty, ignorance, and fear. Lifes censored, silenced, and politically exploited. Individuals shunned, pushed to the margins, mocked, lost in the oblivion of a „cure.”

I evoked some of them, perhaps a little naively, in a script and its soundtrack – the one that now takes the first step towards emancipating itself from the darkness of a drawer.

Sincerely, Munsha