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From the inside out: the view from democratic psychiatry

From a certain vantage point, the concern with a flight into psychotherapy can be viewed with degrees of bemusement – that is, from where the bird never flew. Themovement for democratic psychiatry is associated with the Italian psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia, and the closing of the old asylums in the last part of the twentieth century. For Basaglia, mindful of Foucault’s history of the total institution in Europe, the point was not just to destroy the physical space of the asylum, but to destroy the idea of segregative control, which might be recuperated by a new milieu of social agents. The deinstitutionalization of communities was to be achieved by creating positive social spaces both for madness to find a voice and for psychiatry to be used as a weapon against the violence of civil society and its logic of exclusion. However, this viewpoint does not rest, only, on the Italian experience but on the experience in the UK of Asylum: The Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry. Asylum was founded in 1986 as a democratic forum seeking to bring equality between social voices, particularly those divided by the exclusionary logic on which psychiatry (and mental health therapy) is structured. The Asylum collective was particularly inspired by the Italian assemblee, spontaneous community gatherings which operated without therapeutic control (and too fast for psychoanalytic interpretation). Ironically, though, one of the first contributors to the magazine was R.D. Laing, who, along with some others of his generation, was already in full flight from the outside in. Basaglia’s trajectory was clearly in the opposite direction – from phenomenology to political (psychiatric) praxis. Thus, Asylum sustained the contradiction between the personal and political – an internal dialectic as opposed to a one-dimensional terrain – with one foot placed in the ‘radical’ 1960s and the other firmly in the social movements of the present. Eur. J. of Psychotherapy, Counselling &Health Vol 6 No1March 2003 pp. 63^66