Democratic Psychiatry in Italy as an Idea and a Movement
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47152/ziksi2023034Keywords:
antipsychiatry, democratic psychiatry, depsychiatrization, Law 180, Trieste experiment, deinstitutionalizationAbstract
The main goal of this paper is, based on the analysis of secondary sources, to provide an overview of the origin and development of a specific thought and movement in Italy that advocated the deconstruction and reform of traditional psychiatry and its practice in the sixties and seventies of the last century. Democratic psychiatrists in Italy understood the process of democratization of psychiatry as a process of deinstitutionalization of psychiatric power and ’depsychiatrization’ in theory and practice, which refers to the reexamination of classifications, diagnoses and techniques used by psychiatrists. Thanks to their political commitment, the Law on Psychiatry (Law 180) from 1978 prohibited the construction of new psychiatric hospitals, prevented the transformation of psychiatric hospitals at that time into profiled departments of general hospitals, reduced the number of beds in psychiatric wards in general hospitals, and introduced more rigorous criteria for compulsory hospitalization, which consequently led to its complete abolition. Asylum-type psychiatric institutions are still almost completely eradicated in Italy, while the passing of Law 180 made Italy, historically speaking, the first country with such a progressive law in psychiatry, the variants of which were accepted a decade later in other European countries (Germany, Greece, Hungary, etc.). Although the reform of psychiatry in Italy led to the humanization of psychiatric treatment and the relocation of psychiatry to the social community, the advantages and disadvantages of the achievements of democratic psychiatry in Italy, in the context of the contemporary global-capitalist society, should be empirically examined, for which this paper could serve as a guideline.
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