«My fingerprints / taken in asylum / They persecuted my hands / like a rant that went up the vein of life, / those imprints damned have been recorded in the sky / and vibrate together with the stars of the major bear ». They are verses by Alda Merini, the immense poet that was coactively hospitalized and who has – novel Erasmus by Rotterdam – narrated the praise of madness. That our society has explored, hidden by confusing the removal of psychiatric suffering with the treatment. It took an essay-the second since in the former dealt with unconventional medicine and his delicate legal aspects-of the lawyer Filippo Taglia, who exercises in Foligno in Umbria, is a contract teacher at the University of Perugia, to tear a veil of silence on the disaster of the post-law 180.
It is almost a novel that becomes legal essay; with From Basaglia law to compulsory health treatment (Edizioni Giuffrè) Taglia points the finger at the “psychoogiustizia”, who erases the person through a system that betrayed the intentions of the great psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, inspirer of the law that in 1978 decreed the closure of asylums with their drama of restraint beds. “The idea” says the author “was good, the result, is under everyone’s eyes, disastrous. Almost half a century by law 180, we are faced with the total absence of assistance and therapeutic system, but psychiatry has been bureaucratized. From the guidelines to the TSO, the compulsory health treatment, the medical-patient relationship has been completely canceled and the pharmacological path was chosen. Today the psychiatric patient is transformed into a zombie by force of pills ».
On a legal level, Taglia makes a trip forward: The TSO is unconstitutional. «I believe that the test resides in the Lockdown which was a generalized TSO, where the coacty of the health measure passed over individual rights. All Covid containment activity was an anti -juridical behavior ». It is no coincidence that before writing this essay, the lawyer assumed the defense of hundreds of cases of people hunted from work because they were not vaccinated and was also part of the defense college of the ports of Trieste who did not bow to the vaccination obligation. “Even in the case of Covid there has been an exclusively pharmacological approach that descends from psychogiustizia,” he says. An observation that makes Taglia say: “The Basaglia law is a failure and the TSO is its evidence; The prison treatment of those suffering from psychiatric disorder is completely unconstitutional. It is enough to reread article 27 – the penalties cannot consist of treatments contrary to the sense of humanity and must tend to re -education of the condemned – and compare it with the prison reality to understand it “. In the volume preface to the volume Daniele Trabucco, one of the constitutionalist greatest, writes:” As the Cassation clarified, the guidelines are not legal obligations for the doctors, They were, neglecting the patient’s complexity, especially in a delicate area such as the neuropsychiatric one ». Trabucco thinking of mandatory health treatments and compulsory health checks adds that with: «Ordinance n. 509/2023 of the III section of the Cassation, one of the foundations of modern health law breaks out: the patient’s informed consent considered, in cases of urgency, not always necessary. And here opens a constitutional problem ». But a lot, it would be said, they are crazy.
Already. But how many are? There is no precise estimate: the latest data – AIFA report, the drug agency, of 3 April – report about 850 thousand psychiatric cases or 150 every ten thousand adult inhabitants with a growth of 10 percent only between 2022 and 2023 “Psyche of the Europeans” – they estimate that “20 percent of Italians suffer from at least one psychic disorder, in particular anxiety and depression” a fact that exceeds the EU average and that is particularly alarming among teenagers. At least half of mental disorders are manifested before 15 and 80 percent of them before 18, with a prevalence of anxiety (28 percent), depression (23 percent), solitude, stress and fear estimated at all 5 percent of incidence.
The Headway study highlights how direct and indirect costs of psychic suffering exceed 600 billion euros, equal to 4 percent of the European GDP and that the aggravation is due to the Lockdown with the different health systems committed to steming this “epidemic of the mind”. And what do you do in Italy? It seems to be right pan when he claims that the answer was only pharmacological. The AIFA report of April last reports that there has been a constant increase (at the rate of 3 percent per year in the last ten years) of use of psychotropic drugs with an expense, in 2023, 729 million to be paid by the National Health Service and 533 million (equal to 14 percent of all the drugs purchased) by the citizens. The peak of consumption is among teenagers (we are at 65 prescriptions every thousand). In the face of this discomfort, in our country there are 4,286 psychiatrists and 2,740 psychologists operating in mental health facilities. A widely insufficient staff; Statistics say that psychiatrists in Italy are just over 12 thousand – 17 every one hundred thousand inhabitants well below the European average – and that there are 47 specialist doctors more every month, but that do not compensate those who leave the profession.
From here moves the pan to support: «The Basaglia law has substantially failed Because there was no alternative assistance, patients’ families are often abandoned and manage how the problem can. If the TSO is the warning light, the conclaimed demonstration are the Rems (residences for the execution of the security measures on which the Ministry of Justice has competence). They promoted them as alternatives to the judicial psychiatric hospital, direct heir of criminal asylums. In reality they are places of detention where the patient-criminal is kept in a state of continuous sedation: the only way chosen to face the psychic distress is the pharmacological one ». The Italian Rems are 31 and host 577 patients (144 foreigners), but, according to the estimates of the Italian Society of Psychiatry (SIP), there are “over 700 people with high social danger currently on the loose without counting another 15 thousand in supervised freedom entrusted to the mental health departments”. The SIP in his report writes that this situation derives from “two factors -hiave: a psychiatricization of crimes, that is, the re -attribution of the custody and control mandate of socially dangerous people to psychiatry, and a criminalization of psychiatric structures, now saturated with crime authors. It is necessary to act with differentiated treatment programs, paid in high security places, the redevelopment of the Rems is needed and the increase in the staff of the mental health departments is needed “.
What pan denounces in his essay. “I took the TSO as a point of arrival because in the way it is imposed today-the doctor’s report, validated by the mayor and then implemented by the magistrate-is a sort of legal-formal automatism that, among other things, brings together three different instances of the state, but does not add the psychiatric problem in the least: it does not take into consideration the individual, it does not evaluate the condition nor proposes a way out. I am an admirer of Mario Tobino who as a psychiatrist and writer supported: the object of our interest is the man, the patient. Today it is only a number to keep isolated by the company and controlled with the “drops” ». The essay of this lawyer on the front line on the criminal law front is also a literary compendium. As Daniele Cenci, president of the Court of Appeal of Florence writes in the afterword: “The state of legislation on psychic discomfort remains insufficient”. But to put it with Tobino, Cenci underlines: “Matti are the last people who remained truly free”. Filippo Taglia, however, bitterly noted that Basaglia failed and causes even more incorrect remedies after the closure of the asylums, that May 13, 1978, “we went from being closed in four walls to being locked up in the shadows and mists of one’s mind”.
