ASYLUM
Modern psychiatric hospitals or common called “Asylum” evolved from, and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylums. The development of the modern psychiatric hospital is also the story of the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry.
In Italy, everything began at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the 1904, when a law was issued to regulate the management of this kind of facilities. Mentally ill and dangerous people were closed up in the asylums, even depressed, prostitute and homosexual.
Just in middle of ’50 the society started to disapprove the asylums as places where people lost their identity, humanity and dignity.
In the 1978 the Basaglia’s law (Franco Basaglia was a psychiatrist and Italian neurologist) imposed closure of all the asylums in Italy establishing public mental health services. This process took several years for cultural, social and logistics reasons.
Today, in the 2018, all the patients with mental disease stay in public hospital or prisons for the most dangerous and the old Asylums are just abandoned places.
This project called “Asylums” was born to remember these places, where people spent years and years between savage treatment, suffering and their own insanity.
Asylums are one of the favorite place for people that like Urban Exploration, more frequently called "Urbex".
Urbex is the exploration of man-made structures, usually abandoned ruins and there is a sort of "code of conduct": never say in a public place as Facebook or others social media, the exactly locations of these buildings. A lot of people use these informations to go there and steal stuff, because sometimes you can find a lot of value things, infact the first rule is always "visit, explore, but don't steal".
All of the pictures of this project were taken in 3 different asylums in the north of Italy.
It's pretty common to find strains equipment or documents date back to 30 years ago or more. I saw utensils, note, medical files of the patient from 70's and 80's and a lot of books with yellow pages ruined because of humidity and dust.
When you explore this kind of buildings you wound up in a very quiet place, almost surreal. If you read stories about what happened in the asylums is very easy to imagine how much the people that stayed there suffered a lot, especially for the technique adopted to take care patients. Electroconvulsive therapy is just one of them.
40 years have passed since the Basaglia's law was established and a lot of improvements were done about therapies of mental disease. There are countries all around the world that still using asylums to take care of patients with mental disease, often with very old and save treatment.
