Ethical Code

Università degli Studi “Suor Orsola Benincasa” di Napoli

Dottore di ricerca in bioetica e libero ricercatore

Università degli Studi “Suor Orsola Benincasa” di Napoli

The author presents an analysis of the current Italian pandemic situation concerning the increase in socio-economic and health inequality. In the first part of this paper, the author analyzes the precarious condition that is aggravated by the pandemic situation and by the spending cuts come in the welfare state system for the last twenty years. In the second part, the author examines the meaning of “dangerousness to society” during the COVID-19 epidemic. In the last part, the author points out some human condition of great suffering and certain suicide cases caused by pandemic management. 

Keywords: COVID-19, Pandemic, Socio-economic Distress, Mental and Psychic Suffering, Suicide.
 

This paper intends to propose an anthropological reflection on asylum memory as a critical revision tool of a very topical issue: mental health in its geo-political and cultural articulations. Starting from a “micro-archive” – the dissertation of a Tunisian psychiatrist who worked in Algeria in the 1930s, in the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville – we will attempt to highlight the importance of colonial psychiatry and the possible enhancement of such archival heritage.

Keywords: Mental Health, Asylum, Archive, Colonial Psychiatry, Ethnocentrism. 
 

In Italy, the history of psychiatric internment did not end in 1978 with the 180 Psychiatric Act. The idea and practice of assuring to suffering people hospitalization and not allow treatment and support are still alive. The solutions usually have implemented to treat refugees whose major guilt appears to be the state of refugee itself while are concentrated in crowded and neglected sites. Similarities can have focused on the way of different populations, i.e. people suffering from mental health problems and refugees. This paper aims to describe the places of abandon and show how psychosocial remediation are similar if we think and practice coping strategies attempted to enforce people subjectivity and personal and interpersonal resources. 

Keywords: Asylum, Refugees, Internment.
 

This article focuses on the interactions between prison, madness and power, from the modern era to the mature unfolding of digital sovereignty. In this extended transition, the significant novelty, is that the digital gaze goes far and much deeper than that of the Panopticon, to the point of making prison and mental suffering one of the most atrocious moulds of life which is no longer living.

Keywords: Prison, Madness, Mental Health, Social Control, Power.
 

The latest criminal asylums were closed in 2015. This essay analyzes their history and the process that led to their closure. Our goal is to answer the question: what remains of the criminal asylum after the reform? Can it be said that, after more than a century, that mental hospital culture is finally a sad reminder of the past? 

Keywords: Asylum, Psychiatry, Restraint.
 

Università degli Studi di Sassari

The Italian reform law of 1978 is part of a “metamorphosis” which involves western countries’ mental health policies after the Second World War. That is, the questioning of Mental Hospital such place of takes care from people with mental health disorders, which is the basis of Asylums’ birth in 19th century. But in Italy, with the reform law, we have a paradigm shift in psychiatry health care in relation to this confinement paradigm, that had dominated the relationship from mental illness and modern society. The aim of this paper is to analyze the implementation of Italian’s Mental Health policies and the evolution of the politics of psychiatry after the closure of Mental Hospitals.

Keyword: Mental Health Policies; Deinstitutionalization; Law n. 180.
 

The authors have different professional roles and age. They share their work in public and no-profit organizations for mental health in the area of Gorizia, FVG.
In the co-writing “starting from self-awareness,” they have analyzed their actual/real work.
Different needs from various people experiencing conflicts in many areas such as family, work, health/social organizations and multidisciplinary groups lead to multiple perspectives at different levels of consideration, interpretation, understanding.
Working group and those who experience discomfort come from a world of divisions, categorizations and hierarchies: the world that produces illness.
“To take care of the world” does not cure people with psychiatric diseases: it takes apart diagnoses and forces all of us to find new questions. It makes us think about other possible answers starting from self-awareness and keen and explicit and self-transforming collective actions.

Keywords: Gorizia, Mental Health, Care, Freedom.    
 

At the light of the data offered by the Italian Society of Psychiatry (SIEP), Campania was in 2017 one of the worst Italian Regions in the field of mental health care. This paper sketches the evolution of the mental health policies in Campania since the promulgation of Law 180, analysing the consequences of bad political choices which has taken so early as the 1980s. These choices were denounced with foresight by one of the great protagonists of Italian anti-institutional Psychiatry, namely Sergio Piro. Unfortunately, Piro’s prediction shave comes true. But the gravity of the problems becoming the object of shared awareness and one may hope that the reconstruction of the past and present deficiencies can be helpful to individuate the points of most urgent intervention.

Keywords: Sergio Piro, Psychiatric Reform, Mental Health Services.
 

This paper aims to give to all those social workers involved in the field of mental health protection a key of interpretation about the principles contained in the Basaglia bill of 1978. Firstly, this article analyses the development of the profession of the social worker during the de-institutionalisation movement of the Seventies, focusing in particular on the effects deriving from the legislative discussion. Then, the current provisions of the territorial Districts of Mental Health (DSM) on health services will have examined, shedding light on the relative inadequate health and social care integration. Finally, it will have proposed the concept of the intervention on health determinants as a cross-cutting approach which aims to guide the practice of social service profession: the de-institutionalisation of everyday life governing the promotion of mental health.

Keywords: Social Work, Psychiatry, Mental Health, Community Care. 
 

This article points out the device of judicial asylums in Italy, stopping before the origin of the OPG (Judicial Psychiatric Hospital). The meanings of device practices are explored because they are still current.

Keywords: Device, Judicial Asylums, Italian Context, Repressive Pratices. 
 

Università degli Studi “Suor Orsola Benincasa” di Napoli

Fragments of an autobiographical story become an occasion for reflection on the spaces of exclusion and exception. The question “What’s left of the asylum?” is asked to rethink the place of care and recognition of the person. 
The COVID-19 emergency becomes the backdrop for a greater emergency of solitude and silence.

Keywords: Körper, Leib, Care. 
 

Festival dei Matti was founded for desire to bring back to the public debate as the relationship between madness and normality, mental health and mental illness. The protagonists are people who experienced psychic discomfort, ordinary citizens, humanists, artists, poets, writers, film directors, photographers, musicians. Anyone has contributed suggestively to the reflection about the theme. The bet is to continue a cultural and political battle inspired by Franco Basaglia and the Deinstitutionalization movement in 1961 inside the Gorizia’s mental hospital. The social movement believes that mental illness and normality concern everybody’s life and they are too essential themes to be left at the mercy of the insiders.

Keywords: Madness, Normality, Security, Fantasy, Public Debate.
 

In 2016 we conducted a cross-media laboratory in a mental health day centre in Rome. The aim of this essay is not to examine the skills acquired by the participants in the use of communication tools, but to focus on their newfound abilities to look around them, to plan and manage one’s own and standard time, to find a channel to be part of the current world. This teamwork has created a web TV, a Facebook page and a short film. The short film, Reach Out, was useful for a high school lab, in which attempts have made to reflect on some representations of mental illness through media, paintings and photography, to deconstruct them and to unravel the prejudices behind these.

Keywords: Cross-media, Short Film, Mental Health.
 

The photographic language is a powerful instrument of historical divulgation: thanks to its characteristic of stopping time, photography can show us a present that has been, creating new narrative forms capable of plunging us into moments of the past. Important the delicate reality of the Italian asylum through photographs and other types of visual images. It allows us to keep our heritage. It is disappearing and distribute them to all those people who do not have access to other forms of information, but who need it to enhance their territorial history. A modern historical divulgation to raise awareness on an important topic, intercepting a new public is waiting for information in the dilated and increasingly distracted, a world of the web.

Keywords: Photography, Modern Divulgation, Asylum History.
 

Radio Fragola was born in July 2016, in the ex-psychiatric hospital of Gorizia, now known as Parco Basaglia. Starting the history of radios, and in specific, Radio Fragola Trieste, It was born in old spaces of the Psychiatric Hospital of Trieste. The project has conceived as a physical place for meeting and teaching. It comes to be s as an opportunity to create innovative radiophonic tools to be distributed on the web. It is an example of a reality in which mental health practices and qualified training can overcome exclusions and prejudices.

Keywords: Community Radio, Health, Mental Health, Revolution.
 

Onde Corte is the first mental health web radio in Sardinia, founded by Asarp, the Sardinian Association for the Implementation of Psychiatric Reform, connected with the network of over 70 mental health radio stations in Italy. Onde Corte involves in its programs, people who experience mental health issues to favor their integration and social inclusion. It promotes a culture that recognizes the rights and dignity of people suffering from mental health issues as well as opposing stereotypes and the stigma surrounding psychic distress.

Keywords: Online Radio, Journalism, Mental Health, Recovery, Equality.
 

The article is a sort of story-telling about the historical, cultural and social myth of the mad women, revealing the construction of a stereotype about the behaviour of them.
So, throughout the construction of the figure of the mad women, we can see that again, the price for them is a painful splitting of their own story and life. Every different behaviour from da refusal of role in the family to the open rebellion in the society is going to dealing with clinical treatment of their thought, their mind, their life. The work-in-progress of the women, from the grassroots movement all around the world to the female authors as Christa Wolf, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and so on, paved the way to realize another vision of ourselves, on the cultural, historical and scientific level. The analyses of the myth and the archetype suggest us to come back at the origin of our history of women and re-build a collective consciousness of ourselves. 

Keywords: Myth, Split, History, Denial.