The Italian mental health care is based on Law 180 (it. Legge 180), also called Legge Basaglia, from the name of the author of the reform, Franco Basaglia. It was adopted on May 13th 1978. The new legislation resulted from the actions of a strong anti-psychiatric movement and it brought about a major change in the organization of psychiatric care. The reform and its consequences were widely studied by the researchers, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The authors point out many successes of the reform, especially in its beginning. They seek the sources of its failure in a faulty and incomplete implementation. Legge Basaglia completely changed the structure of mental health care in Italy, finally bringing psychiatry back to medicine and the general hospitals, as well as promoting community-based psychiatry. Deinstitutionalization in Italy was not related to an increase in compulsory psychiatric hospitalizations, suicide attempts by the mentally ill, nor did it raise the number of crimes committed by them. It also did not cause common trans-institutionalization, with the transfer of patients to the private sector, as predicted by its opponents.
Keywords: deinstitutionalisation; mental health care in Italy; psychiatric reform in Italy.