Franco Basaglia (1924—1980): Three Decades (1979—2009) as a Bridge Between the Italian and Brazilian Mental Health Reform

Franco Basaglia was the most influential Italian psychiatrist of the 20th century. He was born in Venice on 11 March 1924. After obtaining his medical degree from Padova University, Italy in 1949, he trained in the local school of psychiatry, where he familiarized himself with the philosophical accounts of Minkowski, Biswanger and Jaspers. Basaglia advocated for what become the most important reform of the Italian mental health system, the legge 180/78 (law number 180, year 1978), which sanctioned the end of the psychiatric hospital as an institution into which people with mental illness were removed from society and segregated as if in prison. His reform also stated that dangerousness was no longer a criterion for commitment, but it rather was restricted to therapeutic emergencies and compulsory admission was allowed to a general hospital unit only. Thanks to Basaglia’s law, Italian psychiatry was no longer sidelined to a peripheral area of medicine; it began to be integrated into the general health services. His aims were to close the front doors of the asylums (as he did in Trieste in 1973) and to build new community-based mental health services, which were almost non-existent everywhere in the country. Basaglia became one of the leaders of social psychiatry and the “renaissance of psychiatry” throughout Italy and formed the organization Democratic Psychiatry. Democratic Psychiatry was a reform group, culturally grounded on Foucault’s critique of the “medical model” (Howard, 1965) and on Gramsci’s theory of “revolutionary reform”. Under the influence of Maxwell Jones’s work, Basaglia prompted the development of the “therapeutic community” outside the hospital and brought patients into closer contact with society. In 1979 Basaglia was invited to Brazil, where he gave some lectures with other leaders of the “anti-psychiatric” movement such as Robert Castel, Erving Goffman and Felix Guattari (Csillag, 2001). Basaglia had the opportunity to describe the new advancements of the Italian psychiatric system, which he provocatively summarized as follows: