Chaosophy - autonomous learning

the "poor cousins" of other hospital functions. It must be said,
however, that a great distance had been covered between the initial
discussions surrounding this project and the enactment of Law
180. The whole idea of the suppression of psychiatric hospitals
appeared in the context of the social activism of the 1960s,
favorable as it was to all sorts of innovations. But in 1980, this
contestatory and creative wave was washing out, giving way to a
new form of social conservatism. Whatever the case, Italian reformers
of psychiatry had put their finger on the essential problem: only the
sensitization and mobilization of the entire social context could
create conditions favorable to real transformation. Certain experiments
like that of Triest offered living proof In his film Fous a
defier (Madmen Unbound) Marco Bellochio showed seriously ill
people welcomed in the context of industrial enterprise by union
militants who declared that their presence had modified, in a more
humane way, the entire climate of the workplace. The idealist
character of these experiments makes one smile these days, considering
the development -of increasingly computerized and
robotized industries, yet the global aims of the Italians remain
sound. To resituate psychiatry in an urban context does not mean
to artificially insert facilities and clinical teams there, but to reinvent
it, while at the same time developing other social practices with the
direct participation of the populations concerned.
In 1975, on the initiative of a group of friends, Mony Elka'im
(a world-renowned Moroccan psychiatrist specializing in family
therapy) convoked a meeting in Brussels during which an International
Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry was launched. We
proposed to combine and, if possible, to surpass the diverse initiatives
inspired by Laing, Cooper, Basaglia, etc. We wanted, above
all, to disengage ourselves from the almost exclusively mass-mediatized
character of anti-psychiatry in order to launch a movement
that effectively engaged mental health workers and patients. Under
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