Marcello Ferrada de Noli

Biography

Marcello Ferrada de Noli, also referred to as Ferrada-Noli, was born in Chile 25 July 1943, in family of Italian ancestry rooted in Genoa (Liguria), descendants of the nobleman and explorer Antonio de Noli. His father was a company owner and former officer in the Carabineers and an elite equestrian, and his mother was a university professor and artist. His first degree was in Philosophy, and he became a Full Professor of Psychology at the age of 27 (University of Chile, Arica, 1970); he was a Full Professor at the University of Concepcion at the time of Augusto Pinochet's 1973 Chilean coup d'etat.

Marcello Ferrada de Noli had a classical liberal ideological background, influenced by his eldest brother, a lawyer with previous membership in the right-wing Liberal Party. However, he later evolved towards left-liberal and social-libertarian positions. At age 22, Marcello Ferrada de Noli was one of the founders of MIR, the Movement of the Revolutionary Left. MIR was a Chilean political party and former left-wing guerrilla organization (founded on October 12, 1965) prominent in the resistance to the Pinochet Dictatorship. Together with his old-time school friend Miguel Enriquez (died in combat 1974) and Marco A. Enriquez, Ferrada de Noli was an author of the Political-military Theses of MIR - known also as La Tesis Insurreccional - the first document of MIR approved in its foundation congress of 1965; there he represented left-libertarian standpoints.

During the government of the Christian Democratic Party, President Eduardo Frei Montalva declared MIR to be illegal and Marcello Ferrada de Noli was posted in the nation-wide published wanted-list of thirteen fugitive MIR leaders, together with his friends Miguel Enriquez, Bautista van Schouwen, and others. Later captured in August 1969 Ferrada de Noli was acquitted without trial after having been kept in isolation at Concepcion prison (La Carcel). Altogether he had been captured or imprisoned on seven occasions for his political activities in Chile during his time in the MIR but was never condemned by a Chilean court.

In the aftermath of the resistance to the military coup of 1973 Marcello Ferrada de Noli was captured in Concepcion and taken first to the Stadium and later was imprisoned in Quiriquina Island Prisoners Camp. After his liberation he went to Italy, where he was one of the witnesses before the Russell Tribunal which investigated human rights violations in Chile and Latin America. He then became a member of the Russell Tribunal Scientific Secretariat in Rome. Afterwards, assigned by MIR to Sweden, he was granted Geneva Convention political refugee status after the intervention of one of the founders of the Swedish section of Amnesty International, the lawyer Hans Goran Franck. During his exile in Sweden Ferrada de Noli remained in operative activities of MIR's Comite Exterior until 1977, latterly assigned as head of counter-intelligence operations of MIR in Northern Europe at the times of Pinochet Operation Condor. He left MIR definitively in 1977 - two years after the killing by Pinochet’s security forces of his two closest friends Miguel Enriquez and Bautista Van Schouwen - and after unresolved ideological confrontations with the new MIR-leadership which advocated a broad political coalition comprising the Communist Party and the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), which Ferrada de Noli opposed.

In 1998, while Professor at the University of Tromso in Norway, Ferrada de Noli publicly demanded the extradition of Pinochet, who was at the time in London, to stand trial in Scandinavia for the forced disappearance under captivity of his friends Bautista van Schouwen and Edgardo Enriquez.

Research

Ferrada de Noli found several indicators (psychiatric and epidemiological markers) of heightened suicidal behaviour in cross-cultural settings. One was the high correlation discovered 1998 between PTSD the diagnosis and history of injury-related severe trauma, such us torture under captivity, in the mechanism of suicide methods. Other findings referred to heightened prevalence of suicidal behaviour associated to PTSD psychiatric co-morbidity, particularly late-onset PTSD (2004). He had previously reported (1996) PTSD clinical symptoms being more determinant of suicidal behaviour than cultural differences among traumatised refugees.

Another discovery was the over-representation of immigrants in the epidemiology of suicide in Sweden. The phenomenon was first reported by Ferrada de Noli in 1990 as a statistical trend, and later, in 1994, by establishing high significant statistical over-representations which demonstrated that immigrant status is a risk factor for suicidal deaths in Sweden. In a nation-wide study of 1996 he reported the Relative risk estimate for immigrant suicides in Sweden as a whole (1.5 more times than for a native Swede). Being foreign-born immigrants fourteen percent of the Swedish population, the finding also had political relevance and called for reforms to be introduced. This was heightened when in a later investigation (1997) Ferrada-Noli et al. demonstrated that, compared with native Swedes, less immigrants who have died of suicide had sought help for their suicidal crisis; and that among those immigrants that did seek help at psychiatric emergency services, significantly less were admitted for further treatment, compared with native Swedes.

Further, he had several pioneering findings on the negative impact of poverty and unfavourable socioeconomic indicators in the incidence of suicide in Sweden. This research publications series included the empirically based rebuttal in 1997 of the socioeconomic hypothesis of suicide incidence (Emile Durkheim, 1897) and which had prevailed for a period of a hundred years.

Ferrada de Noli's conclusions on the negative correlation poverty-suicide in Sweden were at first debated by David Lester, the eminent suicide researcher and a follower in this regard of the Durkheim School. However, a Swedish study conducted over a decade after at Stockholm University by Sara Magnusson and Ilkka Makinen and which used nation-wide epidemiological data, confirmed the early findings of Ferrada-Noli.

He is also credited with the identification of a new diagnostic category among suicidal behaviours (Metasuicide, referring to violent deaths in which self-inflicted lethal intent is deliberately concealed).

One of Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli's last input to international and cross-cultural psychiatric epidemiology was as contributor author in the Oxford Textbook of Suicidology., however he continued lecturing until 2012. In 2014 published in the Swedish medical journal Lakartidningen a late research finding on the increasing of suicide rate among immigrant males.

Swedish Doctors For Human Rights – SWEDHR

Ferrada de Noli is the founder and chairman of Swedish Doctors for Human Rights (SWEDHR), a non governmental research organization integrated by a group of professors and doctors operating in health-related areas, aimed to the research and report of effects of war atrocities in civil populations, torture of prisoners and human rights transgressions. The organization implements its endeavour in the following areas: country-scenarios were civil populations have been targeted by war crimes, transgressions by the part of governments on the human rights of individuals exposing war crimes, individual cases of doctors subjected to human rights violations, and research on the effects of torture in prisoners. See further description in the organization's Manifest. The first elected board of SWEDHR was composed by Leif Elinder, Marcello Ferrada de Noli (Chairman), Martin Gelin, Alberto Gutierrez, Ove B. Johansson, Lena Oske, Armando Popa, Anders Romelsjo (Vice-Chairman), Marita Troye-Blomberg, and Luz Varela.

Academic awards

On June 30, 2005, Marcello Ferrada de Noli was awarded the academic distinction Profesor Invitado of the Instituto Superior de Ciencias Medicas de La Habana by the Cuban authorities cited "for his dedication and commitment to the betterment of human life" and "for his pioneering contributions to epidemiological research, and particularly his international studies on the phenomenon of suicide among immigrants and refugees". In the Elogio academico accompanying the diploma were also listed his principal research findings. March 14, 2006, by the Medical Faculty of the University of Chile, ad-honorem appointment Profesor Agregado at the School of Public Health "in merit to the collaboration that you given to educational programs at the medical school". He received the academic award Mencion al Merito from the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon for among other things his book Teoria y Metodo de la Concientizacion published in Mexico 1972. Finally, upon retirement, he was awarded by University of Gavle(Sweden) the "title of distinction" Professor Emeritus of Public Health Sciences "in value of meritorious academic services" (1 July 2007).

Professor Emeritus

Marcello Ferrada de Noli retired from full academic activities 2008. As Professor Emeritus, he proceeded with academic assignments as Senior Advisor at the Dept. of Immunology, WGC, Stockholm University, until 2012; He was appointed by the Swedish Government (Ministry of Education and Research) as alternative scientific member of the Research Ethic Review Committee, Uppsala Region, in 2005; the appointment was extended under the new government 2009. He resigned to the assignment in 2012. At present he is a permanent resident of Italy, where the Liguria-based Antonio de Noli Academic Society voted him Lifetime Honorary President in 2012. He co-authored in 2013 the book "Da Noli a Capo Verde - Antonio de Noli e l'inizio delle scoperte del Nuovo Mondo" and he was also editor of the English version "From Noli To Cape Verde: Antonio de Noli and the beginning of the New World Discoveries". In 2014 Ferrada de Noli founded the editing company Libertarian Books - Sweden, where he published several titles, among other his book "Sweden VS. Assange. Human Righs Issues".

Burnout-epidemic Controversy

Marcello Ferrada de Noli’s findings on the overrepresentation of suicide among immigrants and refugees in Sweden were not challenged, in spite of the sensitiveness of the issue and that the discoveries had wide media coverage. On the contrary, his public opposition to the Swedish psychiatric diagnosis utbrandhet (referring to psychic exhaustion and/or depression caused by job stress) produced much controversy, as seen in the Swedish media, TV and Swedish medical publications. In his article "The Emperor's burnt out clothes" ("Kejsarens utbranda klader") published 2004 in Sociological Research he objected the diagnosis for "lacking scientific and epidemiological grounds" and for referring to a "non medically verifiable" condition — ultimately suggesting that profit-interests of the researchers and psychotherapists involved, as well as the anti-depressant drugs manufacturers', were behind what he labelled "a pseudo-epidemics". Ferrada de Noli first made his thesis known to the public in the debate-article "Job-stress burnout: merely a passing fad" (Utbrandheten - mest en modetrend), published by Sweden’s leading newspaper DN in October 2000, where he argued a multiple-causality explanation of the phenomenon, not only a job-stress related one. The publication initiated a storm of protest among the professionals and politicians involved in the launching of the new diagnosis.

The Swedish Industry Minister Mona Sahlin, of the social democratic government, declared in the newspaper Expressen that the Ferrada de Noli's theses were "insulting, to put it mildly"; that the diagnosis utbrandhet was not related to familiar issues such as gender inequality; and that it is instead "related to bad organization in the working environment. Ferrada de Noli called for a broader explanation of the burnout-phenomenon diathesis, such as the political changes exerted on the Swedish model during the 90’s initiated during the social democratic government of Goran Persson. These systemic changes, said the author, resulting in privatization of important sectors of the economy and rapid demobilization of welfare services and community organizations, also led to increasing individualism, ego-attention, and a "resurrection of Freudianism". "It is the focus on our stressful lives that has increased, rather than the stress itself" he said, and claimed that a politically-caused real society problem has been reduced in the mind of individuals to the idea of a health related problem of their own - a classical alienation. They feel ill without having a disease, he said. Ferrada de Noli's main epidemiological contention was that the Swedish authorities misconstrue statistics of the increasing number of sick leaves granted (which were mainly based on self-reports, and not on clinical findings) with the real incidence and prevalence measurements of a disease. Another argument was that the levels of stress reported by individuals in a given society only partially have anything to do with "increased stress at work", and that the perceived stress by an individual is "a total sum" of a variety of stress inducing personal parameters such as finances, relationships, issues of gender equality, etc.

Finally, the Swedish authorities, following the recommendations of a panel of experts appointed by the National Board of Health and Welfare, approved the inclusion of the new burnout-diagnosis and coined the term "exhaustion syndrome" (utmattningssyndrom). However, as DN pointed out, the very researchers and/or protagonists of utbrandhet clinicians that proposed the new diagnosis, was part of the panel of experts selected by the health authorities. Neither Prof. Ferrada de Noli nor any other academic known to question the diagnosis utbrandhet was called on to participate on the panel.

By 2004, after a reform in the economic terms of health insurance, the number of sick-leaves reported as utbrandhet or utmattningssyndrom started to diminish notably and successively in Sweden; further, by 2010 they were less than the half of the 2006 figure.—although reports in the media about the increasing stress in society and at work continued unabated. In a late exclusive interview with the newspaper DN in 2008, Marcello Ferrada de Noli claimed that his opposition against the official thesis on utbrandhet had resulted in his having been denied research grants by the authorities.