Giorgio Antonucci in Florence (2017) | Author: Gerardo Musca (courtesy of the author).
Giorgio
Antonucci started his battle for the rights of the powerless in Florence in the
sixties, where he worked as a physician. In
1968 he worked with Edelweiss Cotti at the Centre for Human Relations (Centro
di Relazioni Umane) in Cividale del Friuli, and in 1969 with Franco Basaglia at
the psychiatric hospital of Gorizia.
In Reggio Emilia from 1970
to 1972 Giorgio organised the ‘Calate’, a popular movement of people who wanted
better access to the psychiatric hospital San Lazzaro, where their relatives
and friends had been hospitalised.
From 1973 to 1996 he worked
in two psychiatric hospitals in Imola: Osservanza and Luigi Lolli. In 2005 Antonucci
received the Thomas Szasz Award in Los Angeles for his fight against the
therapeutic state and a Certificate of Recognition by the Legislative Assembly
of California for his defense of human rights. From 1996 to 2017 Giorgio continued
his work in Florence defending people from forced hospitalisation. He is the
author of many essays and books of poetry.
On Saturday November 18, Giorgio Antonucci died
in Florence. He was a physician who became an international authority for the
questioning of the basis of psychiatry. He was a psychiatrist who tried to
dismantle the discipline from the inside once he understood its nature. He was
the director of several wards of two psychiatric hospitals in Northern Italy
who, through decades of field work side by side with the so-called ‘patients’,
delving into their personal stories, listening with acute sensitivity, managed
to liberate them from the clutches of psychiatry.
Giorgio was above all a humanist, a poet
of freedom who dedicated his life to the liberation of the powerless. For me
Giorgio was a special friend, who left in me an indelible mark.
Coercion
Giorgio was a humanist who wisely combined
science and poetry for the genuine progress of human kind. His deep humanity and delicate sensitivity towards the
invisible, the forgotten, the powerless, together with his strength and courage
to fight against violations of human rights demonstrated that it is possible to
deal with suffering in a different, and non-coercive way.
Giorgio was against
involuntary commitment, this form of legalised kidnapping practised everywhere
in the world, every day. He was against the electroshock, now euphemistically
called electroconvulsive therapy, following the linguistic cosmetics that has
been deployed to improve psychiatry’s image, disguising it as medicine: he
never approved, ordered or practised an electroshock. On the contrary, Giorgio
entered into dispute with the University of Pisa, where they argue that the
electroshock is a healing practice. Giorgio has always rejected
any kind of coercion, whether
mechanical, chemical or psychological.
Giorgio Antonucci was
already actively defending the rights of the powerless, even before what is known
as the era of ‘psychiatric reform’. This took place in Italy in the seventies
and culminated in Law 180 which, officially, put an end to the asylum, but de
facto had virtually no effect on the improvement of the lives of people, as
it substituted for the asylum the psychiatric ward of ordinary hospitals,
without tackling the issue at its very core, without questioning involuntary
commitment, and leaving the power of psychiatry unaltered.
His first contact with
psychiatry was not theoretical, based on the study of so-called mental
illnesses, but empirical, always through field work. In the late fifties
Giorgio started to work at a centre whose aim was to help former prostitutes to
reintegrate into social life. One day there was a discussion between a girl, a
former prostitute, and somebody from management. As the discussion went on and
became passionate, the management called an ambulance. When the ambulance
arrived the medical staff took the girl to an asylum. At that time Giorgio, who
wasn’t yet a medical doctor but still a student of medicine, didn’t have the
power to prevent the commitment of the girl.
From that moment on,
Giorgio Antonucci understood the true character of psychiatry: an exercise of
power, a way to eliminate fragile people, in this case the girl who was a
former prostitute (in Italy during the fifties prostitutes had a distinctive
stamp on their identity card), without dealing with the real problem, the
reason of the discussion. Its victims, as has occurred since the birth of the
asylum, are victims of an assertion of power. The key point, always, is power.
The hospitalised are always less powerful than the person or group who requests
the hospitalisation.
Giorgio
defended a “non-psychiatric thought, which considers psychiatry as an ideology
without scientific content, a non-knowledge, whose aim is to annihilate people
instead of trying to understand the difficulties of life, both individual and
social, in order to defend people, change society and give life to an
authentically new culture.” Giorgio maintained that the “essence of psychiatry lies in an ideology of
discrimination.”
Donne agitate
Edelweiss Cotti, a visionary
psychiatrist who was the director of the psychiatric hospitals Osservanza and
Luigi Lolli in the Northern Italian city of Imola, invited Giorgio to
work with him.
At Osservanza Giorgio asked
to work in the ward that was considered by the other psychiatrists of the
asylum to be the most difficult: ward 14 for ‘donne agitate’ (‘agitated
women’). He found 44 women, all of them diagnosed as schizophrenic, who had
spent decades tied to a bed, sometimes to trees. Women who had been confined in the asylum for decades, subjected to humiliation, women whose lives had been taken from them. Giorgio eliminated electroshock, psychiatric drugs and any form of coercion. He
listened to the personal stories, fears, fragilities of the women. He
introduced medicine in the ward, real medicine, taking care of their health, as
the patients had their muscles atrophied for having spent years in a bed,
taking care of their nutrition.
After about a month, working day and
night, Giorgio managed to free them, bringing them back to life. Giorgio then
liberated other wards of the asylum. He organised events in the liberated
wards, music, art, parties. The open wards directed by Giorgio were an oasis of
freedom in a desert of coercion. The Italian writer Dacia Maraini described the
atmosphere of the liberated wards in her interview with Giorgio Antonucci
(1978) and in her novel La Grande Festa (2011).
The possession of keys
He then continued the
difficult task of helping the liberated women and men to return to life, a work
that lasted many years. Later Giorgio
went with the liberated people on several trips, they even went to the European
Parliament to defend their rights. A debate among equals: the false separation
between normal and non-normal disappeared, so-called specialists and so-called
patients were talking together. It was the first time that something of this
nature happened.
At the psychiatric hospital Luigi
Lolli Giorgio was the director of a self-managed ward, Reparto
Autogestito, where people had been given back their money, could wear their
clothes and had the keys of the ward. The possession of the keys is the core of
the matter. The key is the element that shows who has the power, and the key
point to understanding psychiatry is power.
Giorgio’s labour was based on honest
listening, deep respect, acute sensitivity. A peer-to-peer relationship between
two persons that subverted the traditional, unequal relation between
psychiatrist and patient, and generally between physician and patient. This
substitution of authoritarianism with an honest communication, empathy and
mutual trust was constantly obstructed by the establishment. Giorgio didn’t
have an easy life, he had to fight against the institution, against the
prejudice, against his own colleagues. He worked mostly alone to defend the
powerless, with the support of a few friends.
As Giorgio wrote in his book Il
pregiudizio psichiatrico, “behind the most absurd and groundless
diagnosis there is always a history of marginalisation and of social and
cultural exploitation, a history of family and affective crises.” The
diagnosis itself is rejected on the same grounds of overweening power: “The
power of the words of a psychiatrist is comparable only to the power of the
words of a judge. Rather superior, because a judge is only one of the actors in
a process with many participants. On the contrary the judgment of a
psychiatrist can condemn a man directly to segregation without the necessity
for a trial."
Giorgio
substituted the psychiatric diagnosis with the non-psychiatric approach to
psychological suffering, based on the full respect of the person, tackling
their problems in the specific personal and social situation.
Dissent
In 1968 Giorgio Antonucci was
invited by Edelweiss Cotti to work at the Centre for Human Relations (Centro di
Relazioni Umane) in Cividale del Friuli, a city in Northern Italy, close to the
border with the former Yugoslavia. The Centre for Human Relations was an
alternative to coercive psychiatric wards, where patients were free to go out
of the centre —to the cinema, to the hairdresser…— and
have their own life.
At the beginning of
September 1968 Antonucci and Cotti saw a column of trucks of police approaching
the Centre. The deployment of a high number of security forces together with
Cividale’s proximity to the border made them imagine an Italian government
military action to liberate the recently occupied Czechoslovakia. But it transpired the
police action had nothing to do with the Czechoslovakia, but with
government annoyance at the too permissive approach of Edelweiss Cotti and
Giorgio Antonucci.
After the work in
Cividale, in 1969 Giorgio worked together with Franco Basaglia in Gorizia.
While Basaglia was focused on the criticism of the asylum as institution
Giorgio criticised the nature of psychiatry itself: “Psychiatry is a
discipline which deals with dissent, a discipline which has no relations to
medical science, a discipline which judges somebody’s thought.”
When Dacia
Maraini asked Giorgio: “Regarding
the so-called insane persons, what does this new method entail?” he
replied: “For me it means that insane persons don't exist and that
psychiatry must be completely eliminated.” As Giorgio always said, “the
asylum is not a building, it is a criterion for evaluation.”
Giorgio’s death leaves an
incommensurable void. But after Giorgio’s work everything is different: he has demonstrated that it is possible to
deal with suffering in a different way, tackling the personal and social
problems, rejecting any kind of coercion. Now it’s our task to follow his steps
fighting for the liberation of the powerless.
Giorgio has filled us with freedom.
Thanks, Giorgio.