{"product_id":"9781784784164","title":"The Man Who Closed the Asylums : Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care by John Foot","description":"In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the  Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of  horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of  Basaglia's own wartime experience inside a fascist gaol. Patients were  frequently 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. This was a concentration  camp, not a hospital.   Basaglia, the new Director, was expected to  practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled,  but he would have none of this. The place had to be closed down by  opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the  patients, the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that 'total  institution'.   Inspired by the writings of authors such as Primo  Levi, R. D. Laing, Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, and  the practices of experimental therapeutic communities in the UK,  Basaglia's seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia,  Parma and Trieste fed into and substantially contributed to the national  and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the  'Basaglia law') which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian  asylum system.   The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums  is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in  twentiethcentury psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see  mental illness. Basaglia's work saved countless people from a miserable  existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle  against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to  the public as common sense.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56312840683893,"sku":"9781784784164","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781784784164.jpg?v=1762824058","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9781784784164","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}