Basaglia: the psychiatrist as intellectual, theoretician, and activist for a dialogic citizen psychiatry

Franco Basaglia (1924–1980) was a psychiatrist who played an important role in transforming mental health care in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s. Current mental health debates focus on community care, recovery, and co-production. Against this background, the paper describes theoretical references used by Basaglia and colleagues to psychiatric phenomenology, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault, and the role of psychiatrists as professionals and intellectuals, with a view to their relevance to current mental health care issues. The paper is based on a non-systematic search and meta-narrative review of sources in Italian, French. and German, including the Archivio Basaglia in Venice, Italy. Basaglia and colleagues were influenced by phenomenology, Sartre, and Foucault. The tradition of psychiatric phenomenology helped in focusing on the ‘person’, the ‘body’, and the deprivation of individual rights among mental hospital patients. Sartre’s concepts of a ‘personal ontology of freedom’ evolving towards collective action found an echo in Foucault’s archaeology of madness which highlighted the societal construction of madness and emphasized the knowledge-power link in professional practice. Basaglia insisted on linking theory to anti-institutional work and psychiatric reform practice. Basaglia’s thinking helped mobilize forces toward reform, and his focus on co-production of psychiatric knowledge with experts by experience was ahead of its time. This could help sharpen the concept of recovery during the current crisis of European mental health reform, moving in the direction of more pronounced attention towards the (non-market) economic concepts of social choice and common goods, and towards more user-controlled services.