by Pietro Pellegrini
I met Franco Rotelli over thirty years ago when he was director of the mental health department of Trieste, an international reference city for mental health, being the center of the World Health Organization. Succeeding Basaglia, Rotelli had the difficult task of implementing law 180 and embodied with the radical nature of the practices the deepest requests that are the basis of innovations such as the “Mental Health Center open 24 hours” or “the ‘Social enterprise”. A paradigm shift according to which the object is not so much the disease as the existence-suffering of patients in relation to the social body and de-institutionalization is the dismantling of apparatuses, of prejudices to create new knowledge and different organizations. A vision in which theories arise from practices that are always dynamic and attentive to the real use of patients’ rights: self-determination, freedom, work, home, income, culture, participation.
As Luigi Benevelli writes in his beautiful memoir, “throughout his life Franco never stopped working for the redemption and dignity of people “marked” by fate and by life”. Even from crimes. Rotelli, in favor of the closure of the OPGs, has always highlighted the contradictions of a difficult path that should lead to overcoming even the REMS in favor of a community care and judicial system.
Rotelli was also General Manager of the Trieste Healthcare Company and was able to invent a “new institution” of healthcare, capable of creating health while also addressing social suffering due to exclusion, poverty and the fragility of people.
The dream of a city that cares has found fulfillment with the creation of “Microareas”, spaces in neighborhoods where workers and volunteers stay close to people to reactivate relationships, hope and build health, without abandoning anyone. A line that has intertwined with the work we did in Parma on the health budget to connect community resources with the universal public welfare system.
With affection, I remember Rotelli’s initiative to plant five thousand roses in the park of the former psychiatric hospital in Trieste. “Perhaps ideas are born and can grow in one place but they must necessarily spread everywhere”. And he would have liked to plant another five thousand roses, because “the rose that does not exist calls for another time, another generation, a new energy, a new love.” (Franco Rotelli, “Which psychiatry?” Ed. Alfabeta Verlag).