Italian
A strong voice from below resurfaces with every piece of news about violent crime: it would be the fault of the Basaglia law if so many “crazy people” are released after committing horrific crimes or, more commonly, after disturbing the public peace.
I heard that when you see someone on the street doing “crazy things,” you should call 118 imagining that four sturdy paramedics jump out of the ambulance ready to restrain the unfortunate person, take them who knows where, and throw away the key.
For those who think this way — whether educated or not — it is useful to remember what psychiatric work truly is. The psychiatrist does not only deal with the material body, as a doctor, but, as a doctor of the mind, addresses the “lived body”: that body traversed by existence, which expresses itself in social interactions and experiences the spirit of the times.
Psychiatric work is not aimed at neutralizing madness, but at making it anthropologically understandable. Everything that expresses existence is part of existence: there is no alienation, nor deficiency, but only human variability in its unpredictability. The true task is to make it understood that being ill is the norm and health is merely a theoretical exception. Illness and diversity are nothing but the exacerbation of our “normality”.
Psychiatry serves to recognize and give freedom to those whom illness has denied, even if temporarily. Life itself is a convalescence: from the moment we are born, we must face something that can harm or benefit us. Waiting with trust for the unexpected is what we are made for. Being magnanimous means having a greatness of spirit that allows us to understand everything that happens and to encompass it, overcoming appearances and prejudices, within the existential bubble of which we are a part.
In 2024, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Franco Basaglia — a giant of thought and political action of the twentieth century — I wrote an article for the magazine Spirituality and Quality of Life (n. 17/2024), titled The Duty of Freedom. I want to emphasize the title I chose and the editorial framework selected.
Because the quality of life is primarily a duty, rather than a right. The immaterial component of the individual is what makes them human. And the duty of freedom belongs to the individual themselves, and we are all called to defend it when it seems to be lacking. We are born free, but to maintain this freedom, one must fight.
Therapeutic work can only be, first of all, a continuous exercise of freedom, if psyche and mind are the object of psychiatry. Individual behaviors can be modified; conduct, understood as lifestyle, habitus mental, is more complicated, sometimes even pointless and unfair to change.
For this reason, psychiatric thinking is not excluded from these important reflections regarding social coexistence. There is no social medicine because medicine, including that of the mind, is closely interconnected with the social dynamics of the individual and their context. Practicing medicine means acting in the social sphere, and medicine cannot detach itself from this task.
But, if we look at the goal of medicine as the care of Man, we can and must accept that medical and psychiatric intervention, in particular, has value only if understood as taking care. And what better care is there than to take care of freedom?
