The Sonda Project: prevention, prediction, and psychological disorder

The Sonda Project began in Italy in 1985 and was created by Semeion Research Center of Sciences of Communication. It has been operating in approximately 30 Italian cities, ranging from large to small, since 1986. The aim of the Sonda Project is to undertake primary prevention measures at the level of personality organization disorder. Cognitive and communication disorders are, in the context of the Sonda Project, the common ground for many expressions of cultural disorders labeled drug addiction, alcoholism, violence, etc. From the point of view of the Sonda Project, measures aimed at combating drug-addiction and alcoholism are no more than superficial strategies incapable of dealing with the causes of self and hetero-destruction (of others). Such abuses are the most evident political symptoms. The methodological aim of the Sonda Project, therefore, consists in understanding, predicting, and acting upon the incubation disorder of human beings; a disorder which subsequently transforms itself into more or less recognizable symptoms. In order to attain its aim, the Sonda Project has made use of two instruments: 1) a series of Intelligent Computerized Observatories, able to predict, in each community, the typology of people who are more likely to exhibit forms of destructive suffering; 2) a local team able to use such advanced technology and able to utilize territorial activation techniques. These are designed to reinsert into the arena of the social game those people who are more "at risk" in terms of self and heterodestruction, and who are most exposed to psychological and sociological levels of relational "fatigue."