Italy�s Contemporary Concentration Camps

Along with officials and members of the Italian parliament, CCHR�s Italian chapter investigated concentration-camp-like conditions in the country�s psychiatric asylums, leading to their closure by edict.

In April 1991, CCHR, accompanied by these officials and media representatives, appeared unannounced at one such asylum. Hundreds of people were found living like animals, housed naked in locked rooms with peeling walls and old stained tables and chairs. Beds were covered with human feces and urine. Staff had been pocketing government funds instead of spending it on patient care.

Senator Edo Ronchi stated, �The asylums that I saw are concentration camps � we cannot separate the tree from the fruit it produces and we have to judge the system by its fruits. What I have seen of psychiatry cannot bring me to any other conclusion.� Over the next three years, more than 20 �visits� were paid to Italy�s forgotten asylums, locating tens of thousands of people incarcerated in similarly squalid conditions. Once aware of the evidence, CCHR worked tenaciously to get these psychiatric facilities shut down.

Its efforts were rewarded in 1996, when the Italian government issued a Resolution ordering 97 psychiatric asylums closed and sold. In this way, the previously abused and neglected people had their dignity restored: many were taught how to read and write and now can work and care for themselves for the first time in their lives. CCHR was presented with a mayoral medal for its humanitarian efforts.

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