Oltre l’istituzione: Crisi e riforma dell’assistenza psichiatrica a Torino e in Italia

In Italy the second post-war period was marked by the irreversible collapse of the public asylum system and by a radical transformation of welfare interventions aimed at people suffering from mental, physical and sensory impairments. The differential and special classes have progressively entered into crisis, as have the psycho-pedagogical institutes, the educational institutions for the blind and the deaf and more generally all the practices tending to the “separation” between healthy and sick individuals, between “normal” and “subnormal”. This book is aimed precisely at the analysis of that great change, its consequences, the cultural, social and political reasons that determined it, the times and the ways in which it took place. The survey focuses on a specific case – that of Turin’s psychiatry in the 1960s and 1980s – but there are also incursions into different territories – the school world for example – and in broader issues and issues. Restricting the field of observation to a particular reality, on the other hand, allows us to face concretely the unfolding of those transformations, avoiding the risk of speeches that are too vague or generic. Without forgetting that the implosion of the asylum has had peculiar characteristics in the various local contexts in which it occurred, as well as different lines and trends then followed the process of building an alternative to the old welfare model.