Franco Basaglia's mind is still needed.

Abstract

Talking about Franco Basaglia traces the history of Italian psychiatry since the end of the Second World War, highlighting the radical changes attributable to his thought and practice. Basaglia profoundly influenced the history of psychiatry, both in Italy and throughout the world, with the closure of asylums and the taking into care of people with mental disorders, even severe ones, in the contexts of life, in the community, restoring citizenship rights to the patients. It has shone a spotlight on the issue of knowledge/power in the care relationship, on the historically determined transformation of diversity into social inequality, on the centrality of social indicators of health, and all the more on the fact that psychiatry is an instrument of social control rather than of cure and the asylum a container of misery rather than of madness.