In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the
Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a
place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded,
redolent of Basaglia's own wartime experience inside a fascist
gaol. Patients were frequently restrained for long periods, and
therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The
corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked
for life. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital. Basaglia,
the new Director, was expected to practise all the skills of
oppression in which he had been schooled, but he would have none of
this. The place had to be closed down by opening it up from the
inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, the nurses
and the psychiatrists working in that 'total institution'. Inspired
by the writings of authors such as Primo Levi, R. D. Laing, Erving
Goffman, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, and the practices of
experimental therapeutic communities in the UK, Basaglia's seminal
work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste
fed into and substantially contributed to the national and
international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the
'Basaglia law') which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian
asylum system. The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary
approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a
gripping account of one of the most influential movements in
twentiethcentury psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we
see mental illness. Basaglia's work saved countless people from a
miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson
in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the
establishment peddles to the public as common sense.
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