El cementerio de los locos

Being very young and in the middle of the Civil War, Tosquelles worked as head of the psychiatric services of the Republican army treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress. Exiled at the end of the war, he was captured and transferred as a prisoner to the French Septfonds camp, where he created a psychiatric center to serve refugees considered "undesirable foreigners" and affected by physical and mental pathologies. Once released, he applied his work method known as "institutional psychotherapy" at the Saint-Alba n-Sur-Limagnole psychiatric hospital, thus inaugurating an important stage of renewal in psychiatry in France. During the Second World War, when more than fifty thousand mental patients died of starvation in French psychiatric hospitals as a result of the policies of the Vichy regime, not only did no inmates die of starvation at the Saint-Alban hospital, but rather wounded from the Resistance and certain persecuted artists were hidden, such as the poet Paul Éluard or Tristan Tzara. In the small town of Saint-Alban there were two cemeteries: the one that adjoined the psychiatric community, they called it "the madmen's cemetery." Evelyn Mesquida collects the testimonies of various specialists and people close to Tosquelles, thanks to which it is possible to outline the human silhouette and the exciting and complex identity of this exceptional character.