As often happens to me now, the Series 180 – Critical Archive of Mental Health by Edizioni Alphabeta Verlag (Merano) informs me about the releases. He recently published ‘Which Psychiatry? Notebook and lessons’, a collection of essays by Franco Rotelli covering a span of almost forty years. A book that I read without first knowing the essays that compose it and which are, both the most distant in time and the closest ones, texts of extraordinary relevance. They reproduce in the most complex and revolutionary combinations, a splendid fresco of what was the psychiatry of Franco Basaglia, is that Franco Rotelli he has endlessly updated with the theoretical testimonies and with the practical achievements of a psychiatry that has continued to live up to great ideals.
The works collected in this book denote Franco Rotelli’s writing skills, his theoretical and practical skills that allow him to deal with themes that were those of Basaglia, but which he continued, renewing their cultural sources and bringing them into a language and in emotional contexts different from those of Basaglia, continually cited in the course of his works. Rotelli’s culture extends, I would say, to authors who were not a spontaneous and immediate part of Franco Basaglia’s thought. The collected texts re-propose the great themes of psychiatry that changed the world, and that spread from Gorizia and Trieste as a testimony of a genius, that of Franco Basaglia, unpredictable in a world, like that of Italian psychiatry, which is always been torn apart by the coldest biological conceptions.
Mental health: who has betrayed the Law 180
by Peppe Dell’Acqua
Reading this book means rethinking a story that Franco Rotelli experienced firsthand, and also the risks that still hang today on the extraordinary strategic design of community and territorial mental health. Territorial practice has allowed, and was the only medical discipline to do so, to deal with the pandemic in territorial and not just hospital care models. If there were still the great Italian asylums in Milan, Turin, Genoa, Naples and Rome with thousands of patients close to each other, we imagine what terrible consequences would have arisen. I can’t imagine how we can think of modifying the most extraordinary psychiatric reform that exists in the world, the Italian one, which has erased the horror of what were, not all, the Italian asylums.
However, this book has the great merit of looking at the problems of psychiatry with the gaze, which was that of Franco Basaglia, at the reality of madness, but with a different language. Words are living creatures, words change, those of Franco Rotelli are not those of Franco Basaglia, but the ideal horizons and models of interpretation of psychic suffering, and of the madness that cannot but be considered as a human possibility do not change. it needs treatments that are not only pharmacological but psychotherapeutic ones understood as listening, as dialogue, as respect for what is the great human suffering that is part of madness.
Mental health, the alarm of the former directors of Trieste: “This is how they cancel the Basaglia model”
by Marco Ballico
Rotelli also has economic knowledge: he was Director General of a Healthcare Company such as that of Trieste and Caserta, and he also had political commitments, having been President of the Health and Social Policies Commission of the Regional Council of Friuli Venezia Giulia, integrating, I would say , aspects that were not part of Basaglia’s culture, nor of mine, but which also allow him to plan political treatment. I would like this book, with a great morality, and a great inner light, to be read and studied, not only by psychiatrists and psychiatrists, psychologists and psychologists, nurses and nurses, but also by young people in secondary schools who they can reflect on the dream, which is the reality, of a psychiatry that needs a treatment that takes place with humanity and kindness, with social sensitivity and courage, and also with delicacy.
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