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Roberta Passione, Valeria P. Babini, Liberi tutti. Manicomi e psichiatri in Italia: una storia del Novecento, Social History of Medicine, Volume 24, Issue 1, April 2011, Pages 218–219, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkr046
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Let us start at the end. In the spring of 1978, the Italian Government ratified Law number 180, which gave the duty of psychiatric care to the new-born National Health System's Local Health Units, whose triple assignment was prevention, care and rehabilitation. The law also decreed the end of the era of insane asylums. Law 180 aroused great interest worldwide. It was the result of a revolutionary experiment started in 1961 by a then young psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia, at the Gorizia Mental Hospital, and completed by Basaglia himself about ten years later, in Trieste, with the discharge of inmates and the closure of the local lunatic asylum. Based on a culture of a collective responsibility, Basaglia's experiment stimulated a challenge: bringing together the duty of care for the suffering with respect for his/her rights as a citizen. Such elementary principles were revolutionary. So much so that in 1973 the World Health Organization proclaimed the ‘Trieste model’ as a pilot scheme which should be extended to other countries.