The Global Impact of Franco Basaglia and the Italian Radical Psychiatry Movement

Franco Basaglia was the acknowledged leader of a vast movement of psychiatrists, patients, administrators, students, politicians and others to reform the psychiatric system in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement transformed individual asylums in Italy and the treatment of patients, and led to the 1978 180 Law (also known as the ‘Basaglia Law’), which eventually closed down the psychiatric hospital system entirely (although this ‘closure’ remains controversial at a number of levels). The impact of the ‘Basaglian movement’ and the 180 law was vast across the world, but very different from country to country and even from city to city. This paper will trace the different forms of acceptance, rejection and non-interest in a number of countries, drawing on research that will (in part) be published in a book co-edited by myself and Professor Tom Burns, to be published by OUP in 2019. This impact or non-impact will also shed light on the varying outcomes of the Italian experience itself, and the debates within Italy over the Basaglian legacy which are ongoing today.