Basaglia, the Doctor Who Freed the Mad – A Review

A beautiful and difficult story, full of contradiction and transgression, sometimes visionary, that questions many certainties. This graphic novel by Andrea Laprovitera and Armando Miron Polacco tells it in striking black and white — the personal and professional life of Basaglia from his arrival in Gorizia in 1961, through his years in Trieste from 1971, to the passage of Law 180 on May 13, 1978. "And I will not sign": with this first act of formal rebellion against the abominable practice of restraining agitated patients to their beds, Basaglia, the new director of the Gorizia asylum, sets his course clear. He will humanize that non-place, that atrocious, dark, filthy, humiliating space — so much like the prison where he had been locked for a month during the war, a partisan resisting fascism. On the book's opening page: a cuckoo perched on a withered branch, facing backward. On the final page: that branch has sprouted new growth, and the bird has taken flight. A splendid image of hope.