OUTSTANDING PERSONALITY among the writers of the Interwar period is the "Dadaist" Giorgis Zarkos. The man who, in the 1930s, took unprecedented actions for the time, repeatedly smashing the windows of the publishing house "Pyrssos," whose owners published a work of his, which they had delivered for publication, under another name and not his own.

Moreover, Zarkos symbolically broke many other "windows" with his opinions, texts, and actions, such as those of academism, authority, Justice, law enforcement, political parties, politicians, the Press, the Church, prisons, and of course the psychiatric hospital. His unyielding and undisciplined stance was the reason for his confinement, for political reasons, in a psychiatric hospital.

This book addresses those reasons, as well as the conditions of his confinement, based on evidence found in the Public Psychiatric Hospital of Athens, in the written texts of the author, and in the Press of the time. Regarding Zarkos and his story, he probably claims many "firsts" and unique characteristics. It is, firstly for Greece, according to the presented data, the most characteristic case of confinement in a psychiatric hospital for political reasons.

As a consequence, he became the first to write and publish books on the very serious problems of the psychiatric system and its inmates. His candid writing and black humor broke the silence, indifference, and "windows" of the psychiatric hospital, questioning the conventional references to the "mad house" and the "madmen" until then.

Of course, he was the only one in his time from the Left who actively engaged with the issue, expressing opinions and proposals. A Left that, unlike other European countries, for unexplored reasons, did not engage with the marginalized mentally ill.

The instruments of power and generally Zarkos's pursuers never regarded his ideas and stance as the eccentricity of an artist, something he himself abhorred, resulting in him paying, like other social activists of his time, the appropriate price, with persecutions, beatings, convictions, imprisonments, exile, silence, and devaluation of his work.

With his ideas, humor, and behavior, Zarkos negated the previously existing rules of the state-citizen relationship and the "game" between pursuer and the pursued. In contrast to the practices of the movements of his time, Zarkos often acted "alone," without the political backing of any collective, a practice he recognized in later writings as a disadvantage.

All this gains particular value because according to the data available so far, Zarkos was perhaps the only case for which the mechanisms of social control during this period, within the framework of the suppression of ideas and actions, openly used Psychiatry and the Psychiatric Hospital.

Zarkos writes about the "detangling center," the "fakirs," and the "mad tamers," almost at the same time that pioneering mental health professionals and intellectuals in Europe undertake projects that change the character of the psychiatric hospital and bring the mentally ill into participation in therapeutic processes.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

DIMITRIS G. YFANTIS was born in Athens. He completed his undergraduate studies (Sociology) at the Faculty of Philosophy at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and his doctoral thesis in the Sociology Department of Panteion University. He has been working in the field of addiction treatment since 1987. He is the scientific director of the Research and Training Department of the 18 ANO Addiction Unit. He has participated in many conferences with announcements and has publications in scientific and other journals. His book "Addiction by Heroin – Substance Use in Greece during the Interwar period" (2017) has been published by Agra Publications.