The first thing I thought about with this book was the movie Shutter Island, with Di Caprio as a mental patient who hides in his madness so as not to face the cruel personal and family reality that surrounds him.
And I remembered this novel for that same point of absolute awareness about my own mental illness. Camilo is a neurologist who has gone into a tailspin. He knows himself disoriented, disoriented, unfolded, God knows how many folds of his personality.
It may be more or less easy to prepare a diagnosis and associate a medication in psychiatry, but what happens when the patient is the doctor himself?
Medice cure you ipsum. Heal yourself, dictator, says the Latin sentence. And that is the leivmotiv of this novel with great overtones of reality thanks to its real referent.
In this book The defenses we are presented with the heartbreaking scenario of the unbalanced person, in transit between reality and the painful fantasy of madness. Camilo was a prestigious neurologist. Until one day he suffered an outbreak and even used violence against his family. The problem is that the official diagnosis had little to do with the reality of his case.
His admission was the beginning of his own therapy, which was not oriented towards official medical opinions. Overcoming insanity and fighting against any external diagnosis, an arduous task to which Camilo devotes himself on the tortuous road of recovery.
But the book not only talks about Camilo, but also about his circumstances as a medical professional. The novel embarks on a presentation of the Spanish health system, so valued and at the same time so corporatist and closed on too many occasions.
And the doctor can heal himself, as the transcendent Latin phrase points out. And this story teaches us how. The real reflection of this novel is the case of the neurologist Domigo Escudero.
You can now buy the novel Las Defensas, the latest book by Gabi Martínez, here: