Abstract
The authors give an account of the various stages in the development of the public mental health services in Italy, from the time of their foundation linked to the struggles to have the lunatic asylums closed to their present condition of multi-purpose services engaged in the treatment of a wide range of psychic disorders. The authors underline the importance of teamwork, i.e. working as a group and thinking as a group, and they emphasise that in all these services, the treatment of psychotic patients is carried out in an original and innovative way as well as in the concrete situations of everyday life, rather than only in the mainly codified setting of psychotherapeutic treatment. The team's thinking as a group is directed in particular towards the continuous re-definition and testing of new organisational methods for encountering the patients, but at the same time preserving the quality of the public mental health service as an ‘object’ for the patients that is stable and relatively constant in time.
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