16 Facts About Franco Basaglia

Franco Basaglia is considered to be the most influential Italian psychiatrist of the 20th century.

Franco Basaglia was born on 11 March 1924 in Venice.

When Basaglia arrived at Gorizia, he was revolted by what he observed as the conventional regime of institutional 'care': locked doors only partly successful in muffling the weeping and screams of the patients, many of them lying nude and powerless in their excrement.

In 1961, Franco Basaglia started refusing to bind patients to their beds in the Lunatic Asylum of Gorizia.

Franco Basaglia insisted that much in the inveterate stereotypes of madness was actually the consequence of institutional conditions, but not a real danger which the walls of a mental hospital had been required to contain.

Franco Basaglia considered psychiatric hospital as an oppressive, locked and total institution in which prison-like, punitive rules are applied, in order to gradually eliminate its own contents; and patients, doctors and nurses are all subjected to the same process of institutionalism.

Franco Basaglia recognized that many of the characteristics of his patients which were believed to be inherent in their mental illness, such as the vacant stares and the repetitive gestures and movements, appeared to dissolve as the patients left the confines of the asylum.

Franco Basaglia concluded from this that society would not know what mental illnesses were, or what limitations they would inherently put on persons with them until both staff and patients were freed from the beliefs, attitudes and culture of the asylum.

Franco Basaglia was concerned that, without the complete closing of asylums, mental health professionals would unknowingly reconstitute the asylum culture in community facilities.

Franco Basaglia considered mental illness as the consequence of the exclusion processes acting in social institutions.

The first substantial report by Franco Basaglia was titled The destruction of the Mental Hospital as a place of institutionalisation and presented by him at the First International Congress of Social Psychiatry held in London in 1964.

Giovanni de Girolamo with coauthors argues that Franco Basaglia's contribution was crucial to move psychiatric practice into the realm of health care and give visibility to psychiatry.

British clinical psychologist Richard Bentall argues that after Franco Basaglia had persuaded the Italian government to pass Law 180, which made new hospitalizations to large mental hospitals illegal, the results were controversial.

The president of the World Phenomenology Institute Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka states that Franco Basaglia managed to pull together substantial revolutionary and reformatory energies around his anti-institutional project and created the conditions which within a few years brought to the reform of mental health legislation in 1978.

Franco Basaglia thereby managed to inflict a salutary shock on Italian psychiatry, which had previously been torpid.

Franco Basaglia became famous for having abolished the psychiatric hospitals in Italy, statement as absurd as saying that mental diseases are diseases like all the others'.