Outlining the relationships between domestic violence and the suffering of chronic pain conditions, such as fibromyalgia. This is the objective of the project dedicated to Giusi Massetti, killed along with her two children by the fury of her husband Roberto Gleboni. A project wanted by the volunteer association Cfu-Italia (comitato fibromialgici uniti) of which Giusi Massetti was an active volunteer, and which starts a collaboration with the association il Nido di Ana, chaired by Anna Vigilante, an association committed to listening, meeting and protecting all women who suffer violence and abuse.
A week after the funerals of Giusi Massetti, her children Martina and Francesco and her husband Roberto Gleboni, who committed suicide after committing the family massacre, Cfu-Italia has developed a path aimed at developing a project based on the points of contact between the two realities - one dedicated to fibromyalgia syndrome, the other to combating gender violence - and to verify how and why women who suffer domestic violence are more predisposed to developing fibromyalgia, and to outline the relationships between domestic violence and the suffering of chronic pain pathologies.
Vigilante, a doctor and scholar of gender medicine, goes into detail. "Gender violence - she explains - has been assimilated by multi-center studies of the World Health Organization to post-traumatic stress disorder. Women who have suffered violence are therefore more subject to frail health and the appearance, even after years, of chronic pain. Post-traumatic stress disorder and fibromyalgia syndrome have in common the fact that they mainly affect women and recent studies confirm that they are co-present in 20 percent of cases of those who suffer harassment. There is therefore a degree of overlap of psychological and physical symptoms" Hence the project, "which we dedicate, obviously, to Giusi", points out Barbara Suzzi on behalf of the board and the Sardinian representatives.
"What happened has deeply affected us. Giusi was one of our members, she was an active volunteer, present. She was in the section a few days before the tragedy. She was smiling, sociable, determined, she had never confided anything about tensions in the family despite attending the group regularly. This made us reflect on how domestic violence is not confided, not even within a reality like ours, in which we share the physical and mental pain, the illness, the stigma that accompanies our pathology, the loneliness. So we decided to take action, in addition to the pathology, on gender violence". From the presidents of the two associations, the invitation to women to speak, "without falling into feelings of shame, humanly understandable but to be eradicated, which risk imprisoning them"