The maddening Bora wind blows down from the north, through San Giovanni park in Trieste, once the site of a 1,200-bed psychiatric hospital, closed in the 1970s by the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia. The patients, helped by staff and local artists, celebrated its closure by building a huge pasteboard horse, which they wheeled out of the park, a symbol of their return to society and the restoration of their civil rights.
In 1978 a law extended the Trieste experiment to all Italy, ordering the closure of all psychiatric hospitals. This took time to implement, and the last institution only closed in the 1990s. Italian psychiatric hospitals had been terrible places — as in Mauro Bolognini’s 1975 film Per le antiche scale (Down the Ancient Stairs) — far removed from the French or British systems, where there were already alternatives to institutionalisation (1). At the end of the second world war, Italian asylums still housed more than 110,000 patients.
Basaglia, a major figure in European alternative psychiatry (2), led this revolution. He had been incarcerated for several months towards the end of the second world war because of his close links with an antifascist group. Basaglia was deeply affected by the experience, and never stopped fighting against institutionalisation. He was inspired by Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon and their criticism of institutions and colonialism, but distanced himself from the anti-psychiatry movement. Basaglia believed that challenging the methods of hospitals would not end their control over patients. Though his views often coincided with modern institutional psychiatry, as practised by Félix Guattari in France, he had little interest in psychoanalysis and advocated closing psychiatric hospitals and creating something better in their place.
After an experiment with an “open hospital” in Gorizia, Basaglia succeeded in closing down the San Giovanni hospital. He turned the hierarchy upside down (with difficulty): the doctors took (...)