“What is mental health?”: a new book that reformulates Franco Bazzaglia’s questions and deconstructs neoliberalism’s medical dominance of human psychological suffering
The recently published intellectual and critical book entitled “Che cos’è la salute mentale? Genealogie e prospettive critiche” (What is mental health? Genealogy and critical perspectives) has sparked a wide wave of serious discussions within contemporary medical, philosophical, and social circles. The huge work, edited and compiled by the psychiatrist and Freudian analystThe prominent work by Mario Colucci, and published by the prestigious Italian publishing house Einaudi in three hundred and sixty pages of medium length, represents a historical review and a strict structural dissection of the psychiatric system in the twenty-first century. This collective book, which includes contributions from a group of leading researchers and scientists in the field of mental health, stems from a bold attempt to reformulate the famous provocative question posed by the pioneer of humanistic psychiatry, Franco Bazzaglia, about sixty years ago about the essence of medicine.The psychological and its social function, turning it into a critical tool for dismantling contemporary crises represented by the capitalist commodification of human pain, and the excessive medical tendency that reduces spiritual suffering to a mere neurochemical imbalance.The book derives its critical sobriety and cognitive depth from the distinguished professional and academic background of its university. Mario Colucci is Director of the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Treatment Service in Udine. He is a psychoanalyst and a member of the School of Psychoanalysis of the Lacanian Field Forum, in addition to teaching at the University of Trieste and the Institute of the Clinic of Social Ties in Venice and working as an editor for the famous intellectual newspaper Ot Ot. This unique blend between daily clinical practice inside hospital corridors and endoscopic depthPhilosophy allowed Colucci and his fellow researchers to present a sober genetic work that goes beyond the prevailing superficiality, using the critical excavation approach influenced by Michel Foucault and the history of psychological ideas, not to chronicle diseases, but rather to dismantle the networks of power, authority, and knowledge that constitute society’s relationship with madness and psychological disorder in light of the structural transformations of the contemporary global economy.The book's first central thesis is to deconstruct what the authors describe as the “bureaucratic medicalization surrounding psychiatric suffering” and the indiscriminate inflation of diagnostic terms and catalogues. The book explains with much evidence and analysis how modern psychiatry has turned into something similar to “applied neuroscience,” which deals with the human brain as a biological machine isolated from its social, cultural, and political surroundings. This reductionist approach, according to Colucci, deliberately ignores “social determinants of health,” such as poverty,Unemployment, marginalization, lack of social justice, and life pressures in neoliberal societies are the real factors that generate anxiety and disorder, which leads to transforming existential and social crises into individual diseases that are treated with medical drugs and tranquilizers instead of addressing their structural roots in the structure of society.The book criticizes with remarkable boldness the way in which the “therapeutic relationship” between doctor and patient has been restricted and limited within strict protocol frameworks and dry guidelines that mimic corporate administrative systems. The human clinical encounter, which was historically based on time-honored listening, empathy, and hearing the patient's unique story, has become an automated process aimed at filling out forms and classifying symptoms to meet the standards of health insurance companies and major pharmaceutical institutions. This transformation not only led to the destruction of the dimensionRather, it contributed to the rise of “corporate tendency” within health institutions, where the success of psychological treatment is evaluated based on the criteria of economic efficiency, cost reduction, and the speed of returning the individual to the labor market as a consumer and producer, without real concern for his psychological development and regaining his sovereignty over his life.The work does not stop there, but delves deeply into the political aspect of managing marginal groups. The authors reveal the continued existence of mechanisms of isolated “totalitarian institutions” under modern cosmetic names. The book explains how community-based therapeutic institutions and modern clinics exercise an undeclared supervisory role aimed at controlling and domesticating “marginal deviations” and controlling groups that are not compatible with the strict capitalist pattern of production. Colucci exposes what he calls “the hypocrisy inherent in models“Globalized global mental health” seeks to impose uniform Western diagnostic and treatment standards on diverse peoples and cultures, ignoring the enormous variation in available resources between countries, and the cultural specificities of each society in expressing and recovering from psychological pain.The painful documentary aspect of the book is highlighted when it talks about the continued “social stigma and prejudices” that haunt mentally ill people even in the most advanced societies. The researchers analyze how current medical practices often lead to a “crushing of individuals’ rights” and ignoring their subjective, lived experiences of illness and suffering, with the patient’s speech viewed as a side effect of the neurological disorder rather than as a human cry worthy of understanding. This rising human and cultural poverty within care homes and hospitalsThe public prompted the authors to raise a warning cry against the consequences of leaving the field of mental health plundered by ugly privatization and neoliberal commercial logic that turns the patient into a customer or a number in the profit and loss budget.However, the book “What is Mental Health?” He refuses to surrender to the darkness of the current scene; In the concluding chapters of the work, Mario Colucci and his team aim to stimulate creative critical thinking among the new generation of doctors and researchers and to inaugurate what they call “collective innovation of alternative therapeutic practices.” The book calls for the need to return to the liberal philosophy of Bazalia, which combines superior medical care with social liberation, stressing that true recovery cannot take place within the walls of closed clinics.Through medication prescriptions alone, it requires a comprehensive path for social inclusion, restoring civil rights, and building solidarity societies capable of embracing human difference without fear or exclusion, which makes this book an indispensable strategic guide to restore respect for the humanity of medicine and the depth of contemporary human solidarity.
