"Once Upon a Time in the City of the Mad," the miniseries that aired on RAI, reached five and a half million viewers—a stunning audience for a drama about something far removed from light entertainment. Over two nights, we relived the story of Franco Basaglia, that "psychiatrist of utopia," portrayed by a superb Fabrizio Gifuni. I won't recount his entire history here, nor detail the transformations in psychiatry that followed his human and scientific work. Nor do I intend to catalog the positive innovations alongside the errors and carelessness that followed the application of Law 180, or the recriminations that ensued.
I want only to reflect on this man—a lay physician of his era—who was the first, after centuries, to see past the heavy screen of madness to the suffering, the distress, the poverty that so often lay beneath it. He fought so that people with mental illness might be recognized, despite all prejudice and fear, as human beings with full dignity, rights, and basic needs essential to life itself. He battled against centuries of conviction, insisting that all who work with the mentally ill—from the most eminent physicians to orderlies—must first see in them a fellow human, burdened with suffering to be eased and dignity to be preserved. I find myself asking: what teaching could be more faithful to the Christian message? Who before him looked past the barrier of madness that has always terrified us with such clarity and such compassion?
A few days ago, talking with friends, we noted that despite the serious and persistent problems that remain, the world of mental disability has undeniably entered a new cultural moment—one marked by an attention and respect unimaginable just decades ago. And now, as I write, I cannot help but think that this new climate, this more respectful culture, is the direct fruit of those years, of those struggles born from the insight and conviction of a young psychiatrist full of humanity, and perhaps marked by limits and flaws like all of us—yet to whom we can only say, again and again: thank you, thank you, and thank you.
Pennablù, 2010