In the 1970s, mental illness became the subject of fierce debate and political reform in Italy. The battle centered on a single number: Law 180, which codified the results of this reckoning.
At its heart was a clash between two opposite views of mental illness and its treatment. The old conception was simple: the severely mentally ill belonged in an asylum, isolated from society. They were considered incurable, beyond reinsertion into normal life. In practice, they ceased to be treated as persons. The new conception held the opposite: mental illness could be cured if the patient lived in a suitable environment, in a society willing to receive him. The asylum, far from healing, only produced madness. It had to be abolished.
As often happens in bitter disputes, the two sides stated their positions in the starkest possible terms. The second view prevailed. Asylums were officially closed. But here lay a bitter reality: many severely mentally ill people cannot live with their families or in ordinary society. When the asylums closed, these patients fell into an anguished void—filled variously with homelessness, silent family anguish, police interventions, "tragedies of madness," hospital stays (unsuitable for chronic patients), and a final hypocrisy: refuge in the old asylums, which by official ideology and politics no longer existed. Some thirty thousand mentally ill people live in these nonexistent institutions.
So Law 180 closed one error and horror—the asylum system—and opened another: chaos for many severely mentally ill.
Yet in a few places, thanks to fortunate circumstances, centers and initiatives emerged that confronted the tragedy of mental illness with humanity, realism, effectiveness, and Christian spirit. They overcame simplism, rigid ideology, and hypocrisy. These rare centers point the way toward a human and realistic solution to the crisis of mental illness.
We visited one such center in Pergine in Valsugana, about which we had heard only praise. It is called Comunità Maso S. Pietro, and it is directed by Father Beppino Tau fer, a Camillian priest.
- Sergio Sciascia, 1990
===FINE===