Estimations
While discussing the process of transformation of mental health care across the European Region, Matt Muijen argues that the influence of professionals has obviously been decisive, mostly psychiatrists who acted as advocates of change, such as Philippe Pinel in France in the 19th century and Franco Basaglia in Italy in the 20th. They offered conceptions of new models of effective and humane care, revolutionary for their times, replacing abusive and inadequate traditional services. Their real accomplishment was the ability to inspire politicians to advocate these conceptions and persuade colleagues to implement them, thereby enabling sustainable and real change.
Giovanna Russo and Francesco Carelli state that back in 1978 the Basaglia reform perhaps could not be fully implemented because society was unprepared for such an avant-garde and innovative concept of mental heath. Thirty years later, it has become more obvious that this reform reflects a concept of modern heath and social care for mental patients. The Italian example originated samples of effective and innovative service models and paved the way for deinstitutionalisation of mental patients.
Giovanni de Girolamo with coauthors argues that Basaglia’s contribution was crucial to move psychiatric practice into the realm of health care and give visibility to psychiatry.
P. Fusar-Poli with coauthors argues that thanks to Basaglia law, psychiatry in Italy began to be integrated into the general health services and was no longer sidelined to a peripheral area of medicine.
In the 2001 National Mental Health Conference, Italian neurologist and laureate of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Rita Levi-Montalcini expressed her admiration for Franco Basaglia by calling him the founder of the new conception of mental illness, magnificent scientist and fine human being who really lived the tragic problem of mental illness.
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. In the following decade many Italian doctors complained that the prisons had become depositories for the seriously mentally ill, and that they found themselves "in a state psychiatric-therapeutic impotence when faced with the uncontrollable paranoid schizophrenic, the agitated-meddlesome maniac, or the catatonic". These complaints were seized upon psychiatrists elsewhere, eager to exhibit the foolishness of abandoning conventional ways. However, an efficient network of smaller community mental health clinics gradually developed to replace the old system.
The president of the World Phenomenology Institute Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka states that 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. This reform was introduced amongst great enthusiasm and bitter criticism, hostility and perplexity, critical and sometimes unconditional support. Basaglia thereby managed to make salutary shock in Italian psychiatry which had lain in a torpid slumber before.
American psychiatrist Loren Mosher called Basaglia the most innovative and influential European psychiatrist since Freud.
Francine Saillant and Serge Genest assert that Basaglia’s reform of psychiatry in Italy, renewed vision on Italian society, and radical critique of public institutions made Franco Basaglia one of Italy’s greatest, most progressive intellectuals and a leading figure of the second half of the 20th century.
Read more about this topic: Franco Basaglia