Let’s Close Italy’s Asylums With the Basaglias
It wasn’t a big surprise that my parents would take me to visit a mental health professional, when they took me to the tourist mecca of Venice. Just, you know, socially. My family works in mental health. This what we did there.
I kind of knew who Franca Basaglia Ongaro was. She’d been an Italian senator, passed some big mental health laws and her husband, Franco Basaglia, had been pretty famous.
At the time I was interested in her amazing Venice apartment and its balcony. I was interested in her: she was really nice. It was a great afternoon, considering how much I didn’t speak Italian.
Putting together this week’s Not What You Think I learned about Franca. And her even more Italy-famous husband, Franco Basaglia. Eventually, between them and a movement of other people, they helped close all of Italy’s asylums. Which was a really good thing.
It’s hard to believe, but in Italy, you could become a household name for doing national mental health reform.
Franco actually lived in Venice, growing up. During World War 2, he’d been an anti-fascist, thrown in prison by the Nazis and lucky to survive. When he became a psychiatrist, years later, he got put in charge of one of Italy’s ageing, small-town psychiatric asylums in nearby Gorizia. He said that it “smelled” like that Nazi prison.
He decided to closed it. It took decades, but all Italy’s asylums closed with it.
There’s a romance in asylums. Fiction sees them as exciting, fantasy-horror spaces. Full of madness, violence and poetry. The horror is alluring in stories, and it lulls you into a sense that this just how mental illness is. It’s easier to write scary asylums than people struggling with the real day-to-day drama of mental illness.
And it’s not true. In real life, asylums were merely horrific. Listen:
It took decades to close the Italian asylums. And at least another decade to bed that change down. Franco lead the change as a public figure. Franca worked with him. And, after he died, she lead the bedding down, as an Italian senator.
Italy—probably to the surprise of most people who weren’t actively working for the change—found itself with one of the best mental health systems in the world. They did it without psychiatric hospitals and without stripping their patients of that dignity they needed to live decent lives.
Our guest for the week, John Foot, found out about all this by accident. He’d also been famous in Italy. He’d written a history of Italian football and, one day, saw a tiny screening of a black and white documentary, San Clemente, about closing the old asylums. He was hooked.
He ended up writing a book.
I know this story, now. My family works in this area, so I get told it. It’s like collective memory. I’ve met generations of psychiatrists socially: people who worked under Basaglia or people that they’ve trained.
My family introduced me to John, of course. And Franca. And John Foot will probably be the only person I will ever meet who was actively jealous of my having met Franca. Even if I didn’t really understand who she really was, when I met her myself.
But then, John knows what Franca meant. He knows why this story is important. Why it should be better known outside of Italy.
And why you should know it.
Click through to our show page. He’ll explain.
Not What You Think is broadcast 10:30am Saturdays in September and October, on Sydney’s FBi Radio. Listen live on 94.5 FM or the website, or subscribe to the podcast via our show page.
