Basaglia Law

Basaglia Law or Law 180 (Italian: Legge Basaglia, Legge 180) is the Italian Mental Health Act of 1978 which signified a large reform of the psychiatric system in Italy, contained directives for the closing down of all psychiatric hospitals[1] and led to their gradual replacement with a whole range of community-based services, including settings for acute in-patient care.

Then, its articles were incorporated, with very little changes, into a broader law (Italian: legge 23 dicembre 1978, n. 833 - Istituzione del Servizio sanitario nazionale) that introduced the National Health System.

[12] The new Italian law was created after conducting the long-term pilot experiments of deinstitutionalization in a number of cities (including Gorizia, Arezzo, Trieste, Perugia, Ferrara) between 1961 and 1978.

[13]: 665  These services include unstaffed apartments, supervised hostels, group homes, day centers, and cooperatives managed by patients.

[13]: 665 In the early sixties, a critical factor for development of the new Law was the availability of widespread reform movements across the country led by the trade unions, the working class, university students, and radical and leftist parties.

[19] In 2009, P. Fusar-Poli with coauthors stated that thanks to Basaglia law, psychiatry in Italy began to be integrated into the general health services and was no longer sidelined to a peripheral area of medicine.

[21]: 74  In the following decade many Italian doctors complained that the prisons had become depositories for the seriously mentally ill, and that they found themselves “in a state psychiatric-therapeutic impotence when faced with the uncontrollable paranoid schizophrenic, the agitated-meddlesome maniac, or the catatonic”.

[21]: 74 Giovanna Russo and Francesco Carelli state that back in 1978 the Basaglia reform perhaps could not be fully implemented because society was unprepared for such an avant-garde and innovative concept of mental health.