A problem of institutional psychiatry: exclusion as a social and psychiatric category, Franco Basaglia & Franca Basaglia Ongaro

In my previous post I covered this very important paper by Basaglia and his wife. I managed to obtain full access (PDF download) to this paper which was only translated to English from Italian in 2018. I believe this is one of the reasons that the Basaglia revolution (or more specifically paradigm shift) has not truly arrived in Britain or the United States. Europeans and by extension, Portugese and Spanish speaking areas like South America, tend to be more multilingual, so there is less of a language barrier. This is why Brazil and the rest of South America understood and embraced Basaglia’s insights before the rest of the world.

I highly recommend making an account on Taylor & Francis and logging in and viewing the page there where you will then see the full paper with inline citations. The other articles in the Italian Psychiatry issue of the International Review of Psychiatry journal also appear to be fully accessible, although I have not checked them all.

I find this paper to be so important that I am republishing it here. If Taylor & Francis have any problem with this then I will remove it immediately (this site makes no money and I do not carry advertising).

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Basaglia and his wife Franca are truly geniuses. The article gets quite technical but the authors are pouring out their opus. Equations dance across the board in chalk, much like those one’s that can help propel rockets to distant astronomical locations. “Anti-Semite and Jew” written by Jean-Paul Sartre shortly after the liberation of Paris from German occupation in 1944, jumps clean out the page at me. It’s very telling that I have never read the summary on the Wikipedia page, I have seen no other campaigner quote it and no other interested party has ever mentioned it. Yet replace “Jew” with “Mental Patient” and the problem is revealed for what it really is. It’s complex and somewhat painful, yet Basaglia et al have already done the hard work for us in the article above. Read and be enlightened. Read AND BE FREED.