LA PSICHIATRIA ITALIANA TRA IL FASCISMO E LA GUERRA

This research project inquiries into asylums’ institutional life during Fascism, a twenty years period which was very significant in these institutions’ seventy years life. This is a phase full of unanswered questions. Immediately after the First World War, Italian psychiatrists brought the asylum institution up for discussion, considering it unfit to achieve the purpose of “regenerating the Italian race” and of preventing the “degeneracy”: a nightmare induced by the decline created by war destructions and by the worsening of population hygienic and sanitary conditions. This decay contributed to make the asylums overcrowded with old derelicts, alcoholics, mentally ills and first world war traumatized patients; in the Italian psychiatrists’ opinion this didn’t allow the asylums to carry out the prophylaxis work needed to eradicate the “degeneracy” out of society.