From “Care and Custody” to the “Project of Life”: A Semiotic Study of Legal Discourse on Disability and Mental Illness in Italy (20th–21st Centuries)

Abstract In Western culture, people with mental illness and disabilities have long been labeled as deviant and abnormal. This notion was linked to the development of institutions aimed at removing these people from the view of “normal” members of society and denying interaction with them. Confinement in special institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals, was described as necessary to protect both the “sick” or “abnormal” person and society, and this ideology survived into the twentieth century. From the second half of the century, however, a new sensibility began to emerge and take root, and a path towards full recognition of the rights, dignity and freedom of people with disabilities and mental illness began. Italy was the first European country to abolish psychiatric hospitals and special classes for disabled students. This article therefore proposes a semiotic analysis of the evolution of legal discourse in Italy, starting from a 1904 law on the management of the “insane”, then focusing on the laws of 1968 and 1978. Attention is also given to the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted by Italy in 2009, and the subsequent Italian law of 2021, which fully recognizes the subjectivity of people with disabilities and grants them the right to shape their lives according to their needs and desires, in a fully visible – namely socially integrated – way, with a mentality that reverses the old one that marginalized these categories of people by confining and hiding them in dehumanizing institutions.