And one more step is done. As announced, the bill “Provisions on mental health” was presented last Tuesday at a press conference in the Chamber of Deputies. Of course, it is his third revival, the first in 2017 (signed by Dirindin and Manconi), the second in the previous legislature (signed by Carnevali Boldrini) and, looking around, with the wind blowing, who knows how far, one could ask, he will be able to do… But those who have shared and carried on the Basaglia revolution over the years do not stop in front of new challenges…
And in the meantime, why not see it immediately, this bill designed to implement instruments suitable for the concrete application of the 180 throughout the country, as a basis for discussion and resumption of a work of weaving and enhancing the rights that half a century of psychiatry anti-institutional has delivered to the “patients of psychiatric services”, today so brutally questioned and weakened by the health policies of recent times.
Peppe Dell’Acqua and Carla Ferrari Aggradi have become spokespersons for this feeling. Welcomed with conviction by Debora Serracchiani and Filippo Sensi, who presented the bill with the determination to regain possession of the issue of mental health, even in the more general sphere of health care.
And we liked that the first point of the speech by the Hon. Serracchiani concerned the need to clear the field of the prejudice according to which mental illness is a social danger. This danger that is a bogeyman to inflate our even irrational fears and open the way to increasingly illiberal constraints and exclusions… and not just in terms of mental health.
It’s not simple. And “it will be necessary to make a cultural and resource investment”. In short, a not simple reversal of course with respect to the dominant thought in recent times.
“The sense of the bill that we are presenting? Make it a flag, a manifesto of a movement that wants to safeguard the 180, give it legs… free it from the rubble of clichés that want to suffocate it”, the words of Peppe Dell’Acqua who, to begin with, invites us to consider the ruthless medicalization that is building around teenagers, “kids who actually try to find their way by tackling rough and stony paths… and let them grow…”
While we have forgotten that anyone can feel good: “I wish the word healing was always present”.
The invitation is to get involved all the way. The intervention of Carla Ferrari Aggradi bears witness to this, her passion in asking to resume “weaving the web”, in denouncing the scandal of what happened in the universities, where the culture that underlies the 180, everything that in that spirit is done, canceled. “We have to go back to talking about people’s lives, rights, prevention, we have to build proximity services… against privatizations (but did you know about the birth of private emergency rooms?! Starting with Lombardy), against disputes (which you die) in this system where violence is all round”. Wide look, hers. “We have to take care of the health of the Earth!”. And how can you disagree with her…
To increase the dose, Maria Grazia Giannichedda does not mince words, she too has for some time denounced the ascendancy of violent psychiatry, the underfunded public service, the culture of illness, which leads us to “buy health goods on the market”.
A good market, Dell’Acqua underlined, to be coveted by too many, in a country where, among other things, about half a million people are institutionalized: among aging people, prisoners, people with disabilities, children and young people who come from situations difficult, migrants, and a worrying number of people with mental disorders defined as incurable in so-called residential structures that have in the long run reproduced asylum atmospheres, and which when we learn about it we are amazed…
Against the culture of disease, therefore, with a broad gaze that restores the meaning of life, as Massimo Magnano said, of Sant’Egidio that this battle shares and supports.
What do you want to be immediately, therefore, the bill presented. A manifesto that holds many together, all those who believe in the complexity of the person, outside the ideological debates, around the care of people.
And it’s not just words. Peppe dell’Acqua recalled the last demonstration held at the mental health center of Barcola, in Trieste, against questionable aspects of the management of the Center, and more generally against the impoverishment of health services… which are not just words , but it means putting yourself on the line every day, as well as with your own knowledge, with your own body…