4 ideas
In 1961 Franco Basaglia became director of the provincial asylum at Gorizia, on the Yugoslav border. He and his team abolished restraints, unlocked the wards and ran the hospital through daily general assemblies of patients and staff, a therapeutic community on the Maxwell Jones model.
The Basaglian claim is that much of what psychiatry recorded as the illness itself (apathy, rocking, regression, loss of identity) was produced by confinement: locks, uniforms, shaved heads and total loss of agency. Basaglia's method was to 'bracket' the diagnosis and deal with the person and their social situation. Only once the institution was dismantled could anyone see what the illness actually was.
Law 180 closed Italy's asylums to new admissions and banned new psychiatric hospitals. The result was a compromise framework law with no implementation funding, so its effect varied widely by region and depended on local teams like Trieste's.
The closure of the asylums is credited to Basaglia, but the work was done by a shifting network of psychiatrists, nurses, patients, activists, photographers, publishers and local politicians. Reading the reform as one man's achievement hides the internal conflicts, schisms and uneven outcomes that actually shaped it.