RESEARCH ARTICLE
Proposals for Mental Health in Italy at the End of the Nineteenth Century: between Utopia and Anticipating the “Basaglia Law”
Vincenzo Bongiorno*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 9
First Page: 210
Last Page: 213
Publisher ID: CPEMH-9-210
DOI: 10.2174/1745017920131029001
Article History:
Received Date: 9/8/2013Revision Received Date: 3/10/2013
Acceptance Date: 3/10/2013
Electronic publication date: 28/11/2013
Collection year: 2013

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
The present work refers to the debate which took place in Italy in the final years of the nineteenth century in relation to mental health and lunatic asylums, from which emerged various innovative proposals for avoiding compulsory confinement in numerous cases. Some of them became part of new legislative regulations regarding asylums, but most were excluded. Today, a new historical interpretation allows us to grasp a connection between Law 180, dated 1978 and known as the “Basaglia Law” from the name of its promoter, and alternative proposals to asylum custody omitted from the 1904 law.