In the 2018/2019 academic year, the Regional Council of Piedmont launched a competition for local schools focused on three topics, one of which was titled "Up close nobody is normal…Forty years from the Basaglia Law". The aim of the projects was to highlight the complex relationship between mental illness, power, and the ideologies of Italian society. Madness, mental illness, mental institutions, psychiatry, stories of distress, of internal suffering, and oppression experienced by men and women who were excluded from society and left to fall by the wayside because they were considered unusual, abnormal, different: these were the topics that students were asked to reflect on in developing their projects.
One of the winners of the competition was class 4B of the Fauser Technical and Technology School of Novara, coordinated by Prof. Anna Cardano. The class researched the records of the Psychiatric Hospital of Novara preserved in the State Archive of Novara, and created a website (viewable from desktop PCs).
It is possible to access the website by clicking on this link Stories of Novara. Before and after the Basaglia Law.
