ABSTRACT
By the early 1960s there were widespread signs of discontent with the state of Italian psychiatry and its mental hospitals. Within the psychiatric profession there was a growing sense that Italy lagged behind other European countries and the USA, and that it needed to catch up with international standards. The backwardness of Italian psychiatric services seemed in fact more and more glaring; it was taken up polemically as a symptomatic and characteristic example of a general cultural backwardness, at odds with an increasingly dynamic economy and society. The 1959 Mental Health Act in Britain and the ‘bold new initiative’ in 1963 proposing community mental health centres in the USA, were contrasted pointedly with the repressive 1904 law which was still ‘scandalously’, in the view of its critics, in force in Italy.
