Author(s): John Foot

Psychology & Counselling

In 1961, when Franco Basaglia became Director of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror. Patients were 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. Basaglia was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled. Instead, he closed down the place by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, as well as to the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that 'total institution'. The first comprehensive study of his 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.