Working through psychic residues of cement-asbestos: psychopathological and political considerations from a consultation in an emergency department

This paper presents a series of reflections stemming from an urgent specialist consultation requested in the emergency department of the hospital where I work. Its psychiatric nature opens up a series of questions concerning individual depressivity, environmental melancholia, and the establishment of progressive degrees of anguish leading to new elaborative and transformative solutions to trauma. But what happens when one finds oneself immersed in a seductive/corruptive external world with which one feels partially complicit? When we consider a suffering community, beyond taking into account the context and the socio-economic reasons that fuel this suffering, we should recount the stories of individual people and gather the cultural representations that give shape to suffering, in order to understand what it truly means. In other words, it is necessary to construct an environmental form of knowledge that proceeds through the appropriation of one’s own personal history in order to produce genuine transformation.