Hands tied or covered and a mask on the face, just like that of Hannibal Lecter, the disturbing protagonist of the film "The Silence of the Lambs" and of the novels by Thomas Harris.

In this case, however, cannibalism has nothing to do with it. Yes, because keeping the limbs blocked and the mouth covered is the "cure" to which Bruno has been subjected for sixteen years, a patient hospitalized in a center for disabled people in Sulcis-Iglesiente, suffering from a disease that causes him to ingest everything.

"A treatment that appears closer to the concept of torture than to that of treatment", denounces the new Sardinian Guarantor for persons deprived of their personal liberty, Irene Testa , who paid a visit to the facility where Bruno is housed.

«I waited a day before putting on paper what I saw at the AIAS of Cortoghiana . One day - the Guarantor confesses - to recover from the chilling and creepy scenario that I found myself in front of".

«Bruno - says Testa - suffers from pica : a pathology that leads him to ingest anything that happens to him. For over sixteen years he has been kept tied up by the hands with a helmet on his head all day long. Apparently not because it is dangerous towards others, but towards oneself».

«I'm not referring to the structure, but to a specific case of a guest inside it, actually already raised a few years ago by the president of Unasam (National Union of Mental Health Associations) Gisella Trincas, but also the subject of exposed to the prosecutor's office, of letters to the then Minister of Health Speranza and of questions in the Regional Council of Sardinia".

The term picacism (also called allotriophagy) derives from the Latin noun “pica”, or magpie , a bird used to raid everything it finds and also to taste substances and materials that are generally non-food, such as, for example, the earth.

(Unioneonline/lf)