Basaglia's International Legacy: From Asylum to Community provides an overview of current thinking and the international influence of Franco Basaglia. Examining his influence in Italy and beyond, this book finds lessons in Basaglia's work which can be applied to contemporary international mental health services.

Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) was an Italian psychiatrist and activist who proposed the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals and pioneered new ideas about mental health and its treatment. Basaglia was also one of the principal proponents of Italy's Law 180, which effectively closed down large mental hospitals in Italy. His ideas and his disciples have had a decisive influence in the move away from institutional care in many parts of the world, particularly in continental Europe and South America. However, Basaglia is strikingly absent from the literature in Germanic and Anglophone psychiatry. Most of the literature about Basaglia in the last 40 years has been published by his followers and supporters and has often been largely positive, with little exploration of differing responses or possible limitations of his model. Basaglia's International Legacy: From Asylum to Community provides an overview of current thinking and the international influence of Franco Basaglia. This resource draws on the combined knowledge of clinicians, policy makers, historians, and social scientists, including a handful of Basaglia's collaborators. It provides an in-depth understanding and critical analysis of the various applications of his thinking worldwide. Organised into three broad sections, chapters examine Basaglia's work and influence in Italy; in the 'Basaglian' countries of Europe and South America; and in those countries where his influence has either been rejected or significantly modified. The Editors bring together the contributions and draw out the important messages (both positive and negative) for current clinical practice and development within international mental health services.

This book explores how the continental philosophical tradition in the 20th century attempted to understand madness as madness. It traces the paradoxical endeavour of reason attempting to understand madness without dissolving the inherent strangeness and otherness of madness. It provides a comprehensive overview of the contributions of phenomenology, critical theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and anti-psychiatry to continental philosophy and psychiatry. The book outlines an intellectual tradition of psychiatry that is both fascinated by and withdraws from madness. Madness is a lure for philosophy in two senses; as both trap and provocation. It is a trap because this philosophical tradition constructs an otherness of madness so profound, that it condemns madness to silence. However, the idea of madness as another world is also a fertile provocation because it respects the non-identity of madness to reason. The book concludes with some critical reflections on the role of madness in contemporary philosophical thought.

A searing analysis of health and illness under capitalism from hosts of the hit podcast “Death Panel” In this fiery, theoretical tour-de-force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health. Written by co-hosts of the hit “Death Panel” podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Capital, it turns out, only fears health.

This book is a collection of case studies that provides fresh insights into the history of political activism in Europe’s long 1970s. It covers the full spectrum of such groups, from the far left to the neofascist right, and from the various parts of Europe, including East and West. The chapters in this book push the boundaries of our knowledge with regard to transnational spaces. For many political activists at the time, identifying with a ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ protest movement provided both legitimacy for their claims and stood for the promise of sweeping change. Existing research has often reproduced such perceptions. This book goes beyond such an approach by distinguishing between different forms of transnational spaces. More specifically, it recognizes important differences between imagined spaces of solidarity and belonging, spaces of knowledge circulation and spaces of social experience and political action. Each chapter uses this new framework and analyses the interrelationship and significance of each of these three spaces. Beyond Transnationalism will be of particular interest to historians, political scientists and educators. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

The second edition of the AACP's (American Association for Community Psychiatry) Textbook of Community Psychiatry is a welcome update of this notable work that comprehensively presents the state of the art in this field. Along with continuously evolving scientific advances and principles of clinical care, community psychiatry must respond to shifts in public policy as well as economic climate. The past decade has witnessed significant political and social changes, including climate change, immigration levels, technological advancement, the influence of social media and the rise of political unrest. This new edition reflects these wider changes, incorporating new chapters and enhancing previous ones. It remains the standard text for certification of those working in healthcare and social welfare systems design and delivery of services. Readers will gain knowledge of: Basic pillars of the field Evidence based interventions Telepsychiatry and technological aids Trauma informed services Integrated health systems Social determinants of health Structural discrimination

When the wind of the 1960s blew through the world of psychiatry In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of Basaglia’s own wartime experience inside a fascist gaol. Patients were frequently restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital. Basaglia, the new Director, was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled, but he would have none of this. The place had to be closed down by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that “total institution.” Inspired by the writings of authors such as Primo Levi, R.D. Laing, Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, and the practices of experimental therapeutic communities in the UK, Basaglia’s seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste fed into and substantially contributed to the national and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the “Basaglia law”) which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian asylum system. The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in twentieth-century psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see mental illness. Basaglia’s work saved countless people from a miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to the public as common sense.