Franco Basaglia: biography of this Italian psychiatrist and activist

It wasn't long ago that psychiatric centers were dark places, secluded from the rest of the world. society where people whose mental disorder was a nuisance to people were locked up "Normal".

Victims of inhumane treatment on many occasions, psychiatric patients had a life of a prisoner, whose opinion and Well-being was hardly taken into account and that the possibility that his psychological discomfort was the product of a life dysfunctional.

Fortunately, this changed with the political and social activism of a psychiatrist named Franco Basaglia, who not only denounced the unfair treatment that patients received but contributed to legal changes to provide them with a better treatment. Let's find out what his story was through a biography of Franco Basaglia.

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Brief biography of Franco Basaglia

Franco Basaglia is one of the key figures in the movement against the hospitalization and internment of psychiatric patients. This Italian psychiatrist opposed the dehumanized treatment that people with mental disorders received in asylums

and he brought with him a new approach to the care of these patients, representing a great revolution not only in his native country but also in many developed countries.

Franco Basaglia is considered one of the fathers of "antipsychiatry" along with Ronald D. Laing and David G. Cooper, although not in a derogatory sense towards the discipline of psychiatry but against the methods and treatments used in the most traditional aspect of it. Basaglia did not see mental disorders as purely medical illnesses, but the result of some type of social dysfunction that had led the patient to suffer a disorder and end hospitalized.

Basaglia was a prolific scientist, writer, and humanist as well as a tireless activist. Thanks to his fight in favor of the rights of psychiatric patients, he got Italy to apply a new law that initiated a more ethical and effective treatment in the treatment of mental disorders.

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First years and professional training

Franco Basaglia was born in Venice, Italy, on March 11, 1924. He was the second of three children in a wealthy family and grew up in the San Polo neighborhood of Venice, the same district where he attended high school. His childhood was calm, typical of a family with resources in pre-war Italy.

In 1943, at the age of 19, he entered the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Padua. His years as a university student were spent in an Italy at war, marked by the development of the Second World War.

Active in the anti-fascist underground movement, Basaglia was arrested in 1944 after being betrayed by a comrade. He did not receive a fair trial and he ended up imprisoned until the end of Benito Mussolini's Italy in 1945. His stay in prison greatly influenced his position on the illegitimacy of compulsory confinement and deprivation of liberty as forms of psychiatric “treatment”.

In 1950 he worked at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Padua. A little later, in 1952, he obtained his specialization degree in "nervous and mental diseases", a merit that would be the equivalent of a psychiatrist's degree. In 1953 he married Franca Ongaro, with whom he would enjoy a long marriage that would give him two children: Enrico and Alberta.

In 1958 Franco Basaglia became a professor at the University of Padua but, just three years later, he left the academy and moved to Gorizia, right on the border with the former Yugoslavia. He came there to take charge of the management of the local psychiatric hospital, a place where he discovered the sad and harsh reality that psychiatric patients faced. whose treatment he received, although not identical, resembled that which he himself had received as a political prisoner during fascist Italy.

By then Basaglia already had his own idea about mental disorders. Unlike what most psychiatrists of the time considered, Basaglia refused to accept that dealt with physical illnesses but rather a consequence of social injustices, marginalization and environmental dysfunctional. His first speech at the hospital where he went to stay is remembered today, being a true reflection of his opinion on the treatment that was applied to psychiatric patients:

“A person with a mental illness enters the asylum as a‘ person ’to become a‘ thing ’there. The patient, in the first place, is a ‘person’ and as such must be considered and cared for (…) And we are here to forget that we are psychiatrists and to remember that we are people ”.

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Democratic psychiatry

In August 1971 Basaglia assumed the management of the San Giovanni de Trieste psychiatric hospital, a few kilometers from Gorizia. For the municipality, that hospital was the place where all the individuals who did not fit in society and, as they were not considered useful people or adapted to social life, they were annoying. The best thing was to keep them apart from other "normal" people ...

Faced with this situation, Basaglia, far from accepting what the center did with the patients, began a process of change both inside and outside the hospital. In 1973 Franco Basaglia founded the “Democratic Psychiatry” movement, dedicated not only to intellectual and theoretical production and the development of public health models, but also focused on political conquest with the aim of closing psychiatric institutions and achieving a more humane treatment of patients with disorders mental.

Basaglia considered that psychiatric hospitals were centers that could not be reformed and that, therefore, it was necessary to destroy them completely, restoring freedom to patients and designing a new psychotherapeutic support system. His revolutionary ideas in the field of psychiatry won the support of many professionals, governments, institutions and associations that saw the need to stop treating psychiatric patients as people who were not going to contribute in the community to take them for what they were, persons.

Among the activities that had been developed in the San Giovanni during its depsychiatrization process, the "artistic laboratory" in which they participated stands out. both inmates and people from the community, neighbors, students and hospital staff under the direction of the plastic artist Vittorio Basaglia, Franco's cousin Basaglia.

It was during the sessions of this laboratory that a huge papier-mâché horse was built whose belly was filled with the wishes of the patients. They called this monument "Marco Cavallo" and with him they broke into the San Giovanni hospital, demolishing his walls in a march through the city where Franco Basaglia and the patients demanded the definitive closure of the center. This event, still remembered by the Triestinos neighbors, became a symbol of the antipsychiatric movement.

This movement succeeded in 1977 in closing the San Giovanni hospital. Shortly after, On May 13, 1978, Basaglia's political activism reached the Italian Parliament where Law 180 was approved, which completely reformed the management of psychiatry and prohibited the confinement of psychiatric patients against their will. The question was to convert the asylums, which were remote and marginalized places from the social dynamics, into centers that would help their inmates to reintegrate into society effectively.

Franco Basaglia created an open hospital system, in which the inmates of the center could go out and interact with the rest of society instead of being isolated from it. At the same time, many patients were able to return home. Basaglia, always interested in the opinions, wishes and feelings of his patients, organized assemblies within the hospital to find out what the inmates thought and look for alternatives that were the result of consensus among all.

This clashed with the ideas of those who defended the existence of asylums, defenders of intervention in isolated and totally controlled environments. The same people who believed that all the inmates were there because they were not and would not be able to live in society.

International impact and recent years

In 1980 the Trieste hospital was totally different from what it was. Old services and procedures had been replaced by cheaper, more efficient and, most importantly, humane ones. Although Basaglia had left the management of this center and had gone to Rome to assume the position of coordinator regional psychiatric services in the Lazio region, its influence on that center and on many more in Italy caló deep.

The old asylum was replaced by 40 different services, almost completely abandoning the idea of ​​forced confinement. The new approach used new resources and tools, including home care. Acute cases were treated in apartments where small groups of patients met where they received psychosocial rehabilitation.

Franco Basaglia He passed away on August 29, 1980 at his home in Venice while still quite young, only 56 years old.. His cause of death was a rapidly developing brain tumor that only two months after his diagnosis led to his death. His mortal remains rest in his hometown, in the San Michele cemetery.

His death did not mean the end of the influence of his ideas, since today it continues to have a great impact on psychiatry internationally. There are those who have come to compare him with Nicolás Copernicus, who realized that neither the Earth nor man were the center of the Universe. In the case of Basaglia the situation is paradoxical, since he came to say that, although we were not the center of the universe, no one deserved to be looked down upon and cut off from society because of their condition mental.

Law 180 of 1978

Franco Basaglia's fight for the freedom of psychiatric patients acquired a strong political character that became a true social movement. Basaglia sought precise legal changes and made his struggle become part of the ideology of the Italian left. Law 180, which today is known as the “Basaglia Law” was approved in May 1978, assuming a before and after in the treatment of psychiatric patients in the country.

Italian law 180 constitutes the first legal text worldwide in which the rights of people with mental disorders are recognized and established. After four decades of being approved and despite having raised several controversies, this law is still in force in Italy. The changes that this law introduced not only initiated a process of deshopitalization of patients with mental disorders, but has led to an improvement in the treatment and recovery of people with disease psychic.

A direct consequence of this law is the fact that Italy is the developed country with the lowest number of hospital beds per inhabitant for psychiatric conditions. It is also the Italian country that has the largest number of social intervention centers, with state support in their financing and the participation of the patients themselves in their management.

The Basaglia law stipulates the gradual and sustained closure of psychiatric hospitals, and prohibits the construction of new psychiatric facilities. This law has been applied successfully, especially in the first twenty years in which more than 90,000 psychiatric beds were eliminated. This same text provides for the opening of small departments for hospitalization within general hospitals, as well as the offer of reception centers or other centers for people who are not in a condition to live alone.

The public service maintains the duty to guarantee care in the area of ​​mental health to people who require it, even if patients have the right to refuse them since the Basaglia law establishes that all treatment must be therapeutic and voluntary. This does not mean that there is no forced hospitalization in some exceptions, but if there are, they are Strictly delimited and are considered borderline situations, in which the life of the patient is in danger in the short term.