When the wind of the 1960s blew through the world of psychiatry In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Itali

To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatri

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast

A total institution is defined by Goffman as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated, individuals, cut off from the wider society fo

Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) was an Italian psychiatrist and activist who proposed the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals and pioneered new ideas about mental