Insane Medicine, Chapter 10: The Paradigm Shift Is Inevitable
2043
Editor’s Note: Over the course of several months, Mad in America is publishing a serialized version of Sami Timimi’s book, Insane Medicine
(available for purchase
In 1961, an Italian psychiatrist called Franco Basaglia started refusing to bind patients to their beds in the Lunatic Asylum of Gorizia. He resisted the established methods of the time and began what is probably the single biggest revolution in modern mental health care that we have so far witnessed.
Basaglia had been revolted by what he observed as the conventional regime of institutional “care” in Italy at the time (not that different to what was common across Europe too): locked doors, only partly successful in muffling the weeping and screams of the patients, and institutional responses to human suffering that included physical restraint, straitjackets, ice packs, bed ties, isolation rooms, ECT, and insulin-coma shock therapies, whose