Giorgio Antonucci

Giorgio Antonucci was an Italian physician, known for his questioning of the basis of psychiatry.

Biography

In 1963 Antonucci studied psychoanalysis with Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, and began to dedicate himself to psychiatry trying to solve the problems of the patients and avoiding hospitalisation and any kind of coercive method. In 1968 he worked in Cividale del Friuli with Edelweiss Cotti, in a ward of the city hospital that had been opened as an alternative to the mental hospitals -called Centro di Relazioni Umane .
In 1969 he worked at the psychiatric hospital of Gorizia, directed by Franco Basaglia. From 1970 to 1972 he directed the mental health centre of Castelnuovo nei Monti in the province of Reggio Emilia. From 1973 to 1996 he worked in Imola on the dismantling of several wards of the psychiatric hospitals Osservanza and Luigi Lolli under his direction. During the earthquake that struck Sicily in 1968 he worked as a physician for the Civil Protection Service of Florence. At the time of his death in 2017 Antonucci lived in Florence and collaborated with the Italian branch of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, with the Centro di Relazioni Umane and with Radicali Italiani.

Thought on psychiatry

In his writings, Antonucci affirmed that theoretically he is close to the humanistic-existential perspective of Carl Rogers, the approaches focused on the critique of psychiatry and the critique of the psychiatric institution of Franco Basaglia.
Szasz affirmed to agree with Antonucci on the concept of "person" of the so-called psychiatric patients: They are, like us, persons in all respects, that can be judged emotionally and in their "human condition"; "mental illness" does not make the patient "less than a man", and it is not necessary to appeal to a psychiatrist to "give them back humanity"
He is the founder of the non-psychiatric approach to psychological suffering, that is based on the following propositions:

The involuntary commitment cannot be a scientific and medical approach to suffering, because it is based on violence against the patient's will.
The ethic of the dialogue is substituted for the ethic of coercion. The dialogue cannot take place unless the individuals recognise themselves as persons in a confrontation among peers.
The diagnosis is rejected as psychiatric prejudice that impedes to undertake the real psychological work on the suffering of people, due to the contradictions of nature and the conscience and because of the contradictions of society and the conflicts of living together.
Psychoactive drugs aim to sedate, to drug the person in order to improve the living conditions of the people that look after the psychiatric patient. All the other instruments that damage the person are refused, from the lobotomy to the castration, and every type of shock.
In order to criticize the institutions it is necessary to bring into question also the thought that created them.

Antonucci posited that the "essence of psychiatry lies in an ideology of discrimination". He defended a “non-psychiatric thought, which considers psychiatry as an ideology without scientific content, a non-knowledge, whose aim is to annihilate people instead of trying to understand the difficulties of life, both individual and social, in order to defend people, change society and give life to an authentically new culture.”