The man who closed the asylums - John Foot

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.