Franco Basaglia e la filosofia nell'epoca del DSM-5

In a contemporaneity devoted to technicality and the sanitation of need, Franco Basaglia’s work returns to echo the question about the meaning of care. Medicalizing, aseptic and standardized practices have become the norm: for each problem we have identified a diagnostic label and for each disorder a technique to neutralize it. In the centenary of Basaglia’s birth, reflecting on the goodness of our practices becomes important, in the face of looming critical issues in the field of mental health which involve services, people, families and the community in different ways. The question about the possibility of philosophical thinking in the era of DSM-5 was the question that guided my curiosity many years ago and which still today directs my commitment to a change in the culture of care. Starting again from Franco Basaglia is my answer to this question. An answer that draws on an ethical, and not a technical, dimension of treatment, and on what has already been done in psychiatry, showing its effectiveness. Relaunching the Phenomenology and values of Psychiatric Reform [law 180/1978] in the clinic today represents hope for the health sciences, so that they can still be human and kind, and so is guaranteed an investment memory for the future of psychiatry. An important and indispensable commitment, which draws on philosophy, and which brings the clinic closer to life. For a healthcare society that does not entrust the well-being of people and families to a healthcare model but is able to provide an adequate response to every person who asks for something.