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That Month

My eye and the emptiness I felt.

That Month

Melissa IannielloPorMelissa Ianniello
26 de março de 2025
em Portfólio

Selecionado no Prêmio Portfólio FotoDoc 2025

The ambulance ride – I can barely remember. But that month inside, how could I forget it: hospitalized for the first time in a psychiatric clinic. Diagnosis: depression due to bipolar disorder. Bars on the windows. Two people per room. White coats. Everything so aseptic. Am I still capable of feeling emotions? A pill to stabilize me, an injection to calm me down. A swing of medications. Doctors and nurses are there to care for me and help me but in the meantime I cancel myself out. I annihilate in a vortex of apathy, nonsense and claustrophobia. I sink.

“That Month” is a subjective journey. What I feel and what I think merges with what I see. My gaze turns somberly toward objects, spaces and reflections. Inside me, the emptiness takes shape. Before I fall, I feel like I have power over everything, I feel hyper creative and hyper lucid. Then it happens: a moment later here I am, sunk, motionless and bewildered.

I suffer from type 2 bipolar disorder, and my depression is cyclical. The ups and downs alternate, both can last weeks or months, both are unpredictable and, above all, detached from events. Roller coasters are a fitting metaphor for what I experience through the months and years. During some periods, these roller coasters take me up, way up. During others, they drag me down—further and further, infinitely down. And I struggle, I struggle desperately to do what I should and what I want, but the fight is cruelly uneven: if the “beast” has decided that I will fall, I simply will fall, and there is no way to get back up. At least, not immediately.

In the psychiatric clinic, I truly hit rock bottom: I was apathetic and distant, from others and from myself, and I had the perception that everything around me had lost its sense. In the meantime, I felt myself dying inside. Can you imagine what it is like to spend a month in a non-place, in a non-time?

I chose to tell my story, and show myself personally, to raise awareness about the stigma surrounding mental disorders and to spark a conversation about rehabilitation facilities for those who suffer from them. At times, I feel like a “survivor”: I am a survivor of excesses. Of depressions. Of suicidal urges. I will always carry in my heart what I felt during that month. Today, and until a next fall, I am a survivor.

Outside the garden of the psychiatric clinic. Me and the other patients were allowed to walk there.
During the month I was in the psychiatric clinic, I often used to draw how I felt. This is one of the drawings I realized.
The aseptic corridor of the psychiatric clinic.
My shadow against one of the wall of the psychiatric clinic.
Self-portrait: I was exhausted and I only desired to disappear.
A foggy landscape outside one of the windows of the psychiatric clinic.
My room in the psychiatric clinic.
I felt my insides squirming. Not just a physical discomfort, but also a metaphor.
The crumpled paper tissue I cried into seemed to twist just like I felt inside.
The light washed over me, but I was fading away.
Still my room in the psychiatric clinic.
The ritual of the flowing water was almost relaxing for me.
This is something I used to eat there in the psychiatric clinic. Actually, it is another metaphor of how I felt.
Still in the psychiatric clinic: the glass of the window didn’t allow the bug to get out.

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Melissa Ianniello

Melissa Ianniello

Melissa Ianniello (Naples, 1991) is a documentary photographer based in Bologna, Italy. After graduating in Philosophy, she studied documentary photography at Spazio Labo', in Bologna, including participating in its international educational program, “Photo Workshop New York”, in Brooklyn. In 2018 she began her first long-term project, Wish it Was a Coming Out, about the taboo in Italy surrounding elderly homosexual people. In 2020, she created M. G. I. A. B., a story about trans identity. In the same year, she was selected as a student for the XXXIII Eddie Adams Workshop. Above all, in that year, she was hospitalized because of health problems: from this intimate and deep experience, she created the project That Month, still unpublished in 2024 because she needed time to process the content of that work. In 2022, her first solo exhibition takes place in the United States, at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester (Minneapolis). She has won several Italian and international awards, such as the first edition of Biennale della Fotografia Femminile and the John White Keep In Flight Award, and meanwhile her photographs have been exhibited at important festivals. Most importantly, she was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant 2020. The Guardian, Vogue, Spiegel Wissen, Internazionale, L-Mag, Q Code Magazine are some of the newspapers and magazines that have featured her work. Her artistic research focuses on themes related to sexuality on one hand, and identity and self-exploration on the other, drawing from intimate and autobiographical experiences.

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