Franco Basaglia (1924-1980)
He is widely recognized as the charismatic leader of the democratic
psychiatry movement in Europe. Basaglia was Professor of Psychiatry at the
University of Padua (Italy) before he became director of the mental asylum at
Gorizia in 1961 an later at Trieste, where he initiated with a group of students
(Dr. Dell'Acqua and Dr. Norcio among them) broad changes that led to the
eventual abolition of the mental hospital in Italy. Through his hospital work
Basaglia came to understand madness as a human expression of undifferentiated
human needs and as an oblique act of protest against a society that defined
difference as a deviance. His political and social agenda involved
decriminalizing mental illness and unmasking psychiatric expertise as a
justification for exclusion and confinement. This radical view led to Basaglia's
abolitionist stance vis-à-vis the mental asylum and to his insistence on
alternative social and economic responses to the needs of the excluded
community. Basaglia's idea spread throughout Europe through a broad-based
professional and grass-root movement. The culmination of his effort was the
passage of the far-reaching Mental Health Law 180 in 1978 which established,
among other things, that all psychiatric treatment should be voluntary and which
dismantled the old system of public asylums.
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