Walking through the hospital grounds with a friend and into a lecture hall with a table of panelists, the atmosphere had a distinctly political tone, which felt atypical for a healthcare setting. The rhetoric was sharp. Arguments were framed as a struggle for human rights against a perceived tool of state violence. Having never thought about Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) outside of a fictional, Hollywood context, that afternoon sparked a curiosity about its global status and usage. The differences between the stance in that room and what one finds in other nations are extensive.
Italy represents a unique outlier in the history of psychiatry due to the 1978 Basaglia Law, also known as Law 180. As documented in John Foot’s book The Man Who Closed the Asylums, Italy was the first country in the world to abolish psychiatric hospitals. This legislative shift was galvanized by the Psichiatria Democratica (Democratic Psychiatry) movement, which viewed somatic treatments like ECT with profound suspicion. In his book I pregiudizi e la conoscenza (Prejudices and Knowledge), physician Giorgio Antonucci argued that psychiatric diagnoses were often social labels used to justify the use of force. Consequently, while ECT remains legal in Italy, it’s heavily limited. The University of Pisa remains one of the few institutional holdouts that continues to teach the procedure, making it a permanent target for activists. According to a 2014 book published by the aforementioned collective titled Elettroshock, the group frames the procedure as a violation of bodily integrity that persists only through academic inertia and a lack of public oversight.
