(ANSA) – TRIESTE, MAY 12 – With law 180 “the mad finally emerged as citizens from ‘objects stuffed in gray cloth’, as Basaglia defined them upon his arrival in Gorizia, and entered constitutional law”. This is how Peppe dell’Acqua, a psychiatrist who worked side by side in Trieste with Franco Basaglia during the years that led to the closure of the asylums, summarizes the value of the great reform on mental illness and its therapies contained in the well-known Law 180 which will be implemented tomorrow the 45 years of age.
Dell’Acqua cites Norberto Bobbio who had defined the Basaglia reform as the only real reform in Italy after the war onwards. But he doesn’t hide “melancholy and sadness”: “Despite the misinformation, the lies, law 180 produced the changes it promised, the mentally ill become citizens. Then the ball passed to the governments, all this at the beginning caused a tremor, then with the progressive entry into the field of the regions there was the death of 180; each region has thought of doing as little damage as possible to the interests formed around psychiatry”. But in the meantime “in the intricate mass of identity of a schizophrenic, a Francesco, a Michele, with a passion, a thought, a rich and invasive internal world” was recognized. The whole of law 180 is “pervaded by a humanistic ethics, by the constant recognition of the other, with the need to be there” and as a corollary “there was and will be the closure of asylums because psychiatric hospitals could no longer coexist with a citizen They will slowly close,” he predicts. Also because with that reform mental health centers and departments were opened everywhere, the possibility of living together was created, social cooperatives and third sector associations: “an enormous wealth, even if, for the rest, unfortunately the national governments and regional authorities have done little or very little and in some cases and even psychiatrists”. Thus, today we find ourselves “faced with the fact of Pisa in which the psychiatrists of Viareggio speak of the ‘fault of Basaglia’s anti-psychiatry’ when that boy was cultivated by anti-psychiatric cultures under the protective wing of those who say that we have armed the his hand. We didn’t think we could get so low”, concludes dell’Acqua. (HANDLE).
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