“Why am I going to sleep if the day can last longer?” Felix Soria, logistics operator in an automotive production chain. Those were the times when he walked through Barcelona with a watermelon under his arm, symbolizing the earth. Today 300 people listen to him with respect and in silence. We celebrate the third edition of the Conference ‘Mental health and me’, organized by the Group Som Via at Barcelona College of Physicians.
With the greatest naturalness and good humor, he will tell me that he is diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. “I am now eutímico. Can’t I tell? “He laughs and we all laugh; what he knows, how well he knows himself. When he is in what he calls the process of going from sweet to a vital gourmand sensation, which I would like to never end never, he writes an email to his psychiatrist and they agree to modify the medication. “Of course I get along well with him because of the account he brings me,” he blurts out, amused. And we smile again.
What do we know about mental illness? Little. And it scares us. For eight years, Felix and other people with a mental diagnosis, of all ages and conditions, have given talks to adolescents in educational centers, explaining in the first person who they are, their abilities and their illusions in the program ‘Awake Minds’. “You have to give the greatest naturalness to a chronic and recurrent disease that will accompany me all my life,” he will tell me, de-dramatizing. And he synthesizes: “In the middle of a manic outbreak, you are out.” Listening to you, I can understand you. That is learning. I feel him as a complete person. The disease does not define you. His courage, yes.
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Today Felix is studying a Social Integration module. You want to have more knowledge to be fully involved in mental health and help other people with diagnoses. “I have won many integers; I have empowered myself. I was a castaway who reached the shore. “And he wonders what now.” I have had a very bad time in the seven years that I lived without knowing what was wrong with me. Now I have my mental health team. They are like a walker, but the one who walks with a firm step is me “.
Thanks, Felix.
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