The Year of Sad Passions: A Second Letter from Northern Italy

Abstract

A few weeks after the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, I was kindly invited by the Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Psychotherapy to write a subjective piece describing the situation in Northern Italy, the hardest hit Italian area at that time, in which the atmosphere was completely different compared with other parts of the country (Facchin, 2020; Scott, 2020). I decided to condense my overwhelming emotions in a cathartic letter, and words came out easily. Writing this second letter one year later is much more complicated: my perspective is changed, along with my feelings and concerns, and the regional specificities are no longer significant. In March 2020, when Italy went into its first lockdown, the air was filled with a mysterious virus, death, and a variety of promising new beginnings: ‘We will get through this together’, ‘It will make us better people’, ‘We will learn to value our time and relationships’. For over a year now, Covid-19 bulletins have been bringing hundreds of dead into our home on a daily basis. During the first months of the pandemic, everyone was shocked by the number of deaths, the highest since World War II. One year later, people are still dying, but that does not seem to make the news anymore. Where are we now, with more than three million global deaths due to Covid-19? What happened to the ‘everything will be all right’ rainbows, to honouring healthcare heroes with songs and applause, to the so-called ‘quarantine baking’ that led thousands of Italians to raid supermarkets searching for yeast and flour? Since the very beginning of the pandemic, the containment measures imposed by the Italian Government – like governments around the world – involved spending a huge part of our lives online, including work. During homeworking, we got used to videoconferencing platforms, which became our window on the world. For a few months, the situation was under control, and there were indeed some advantages, but then we found ourselves trapped in our apartment with endless work hours, suffering from the consequences of an excessive proximity to our partner and children, or vulnerable to a sense of isolation if alone. For many people, these working conditions – which were supposed to be smart – turned out to be dumb and associated with a new form of exhaustion that became well known as Zoom fatigue (Wiederhold, 2020). Psychotherapists are exhausted too. During supervision, R. – a young psychologist who has been training to become a psychotherapist – recounts her difficulties with