The Closure of the Psychiatric Hospital as an Original Feature of Rehabilitation in Italy

Abstract:

In this introduction to a special issue on psychosocial rehabilitation in Italy its context is identified in the closure of psychiatric hospitals since 1978 and in the construction of a system based on community psychiatry and on outpatient services. The particular characteristics of psychiatric rehabilitation in Italy, its strengths and its limitations are then analyzed on different grounds, and some of the key reasons for these limits are then proposed in the evolution of Italian society and in a lack of transformation in the psychiatric identity.

Keywords:

• psychosocial rehabilitation
• Italy
• community psychiatry
• society
• psychiatric identity

Notes

Through an approach based on phenomenology and on “bracketing the disease” Franco Basaglia (1924–1980) identified the main problems of the inmate in his position of institutional subordination and social exclusion in the asylum. Starting from this observation, he began to critically apply the model of therapeutic community in the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia and to theorize and practice psychiatry without the asylum in Trieste. After a fierce debate, his struggle against the asylum led to a change in the Italian legislation in 1978, with the closing of the psychiatric hospital, its replacing by services in the community and in general hospitals, and made the psychiatric care routinely volunteer.