by Maria Grazia Giannichedda
from Il Manifesto 17 March 2023
The psychiatrist who worked with Franco Basaglia and, after him, at the Trieste hospital dies at the age of 81. He has always tried to see beyond, to keep a steady thought and a critical gaze, and to create realities that make them live. His latest creation, an outpost of the «social city», the «micro-areas»
Franco Rotelli passed away yesterday morning aged 81, who with Franco Basaglia and after him, and within a movement of unusual breadth and duration, dismantled the asylum and invented a new type of institution, which demonstrated to know how to function but that life is increasingly difficult, especially since so many have chosen to undermine its basis, the national health service.
Rotelli tried to build this new type of institution, both health and social – concepts consumed by abuse as little practiced – from different roles: field worker and service manager in the psychiatric hospital of Trieste, director of the mental health department since in 1979 Basaglia had gone to Rome, general manager of the health company of Trieste and then of Caserta, finally in 2013 regional councilor and president of the health commission of Friuli Venezia Giulia.
Rotelli’s first job had been in the judicial asylum of Castiglione delle Stiviere, and it had been his first attempt to disobey and do something else. So he had arrived in Parma in 1970, during Basaglia’s brief, tiring, complicated experience with the leftist administration of the Colorno psychiatric hospital.
In Trieste, on the other hand, Basaglia had found substantial complicity in the Christian Democrat administration, or rather in the president Michele Zanetti, and very rich and quarrelsome years had begun, on which a generic memoir was deposited centered on symbols (Marco Cavallo, the flight, the parties and concerts) which underestimates an essential fact: between 1972 and 1978, the year of approval of the “law 180”, in Trieste, with lots of administrative devices, what would later be the pillars of the community mental health service were already born .
I am thinking of the first cooperative that put people with mental suffering to work; to the figure of “guest”, i.e. a person who had lost everything through internment and to whom the Province provided “unpaid asylum at the price of rights”, to use words of the time, through the mental health service which organized small cohabitations, “assisted living” to use today’s words; the mental health center open twenty-four hours a day, with beds, a serious infringement of the prevailing medicine of the combination of outpatient clinic and hospital bed.
Franco Rotelli had the great merit of giving a solid body to all the experimentation of the seventies, of bringing it to completion, of putting it into a system and of protecting its vitality amidst the waves of the post-reform, which accumulated bills in Parliament for delete it.
Those years were particularly difficult in Trieste, with the arrival on the political scene as early as 1978 of a first form of Northern League, the «Lista per Trieste» party. Rotelli was tenacious and patient with the new arrivals, and then with the various administrations that followed one another, explaining, convincing, seeking and showing the consent of the city, making the service operators accept visits from family associations who wanted to see what was possible , groups of operators and administrators from all over the world, curious and skeptical for the most part, but not infrequently conquered by what they saw in Trieste.
But Rotelli was not only a good steward of assets. He has always tried to see beyond, to keep thinking and critical gaze steady, and to create realities that make them come alive. His latest creature, his latest practical critique of medicine, is the experience of «micro-areas», landing places and operators on the move who, neighborhood by neighborhood, try to get to know the inhabitants and their health and life needs, with the objective of creating a territorial medicine that is not only a filter for the hospital but an outpost of that “social city” that Rotelli foreshadowed in a text from a few years ago, a “city that cures” and which all the more reason “in the crisis we are crossing can be a concrete perspective».
Provided that “we learn to overcome the tribal boundaries between disciplines and areas of intervention, to leverage the social capital of local communities, to connect people’s resources with those of the institutions”.