The deinstitutionalization movement in Italy. Ideological thrust to cultural error.

The Basaglia movement in Italian psychiatry is described and analyzed in several contexts: the historical, the cultural, and the "practical" in terms of outcomes. Those who began the movement of democratic psychiatry grasped interesting elements of "critical theory": the definitions of madness, power structures, and medical discourse itself. A backward look at the sea change, however, reveals states and rates of dysfunction that disappoint and indicate that political ideology divorced from cultural awareness can often harden the opposition.

Creativity in illness: methodological linkages to the logic and language of science in folk pursuit of health in central Italy.

Field research in a rural section of central Italy provides the basis for this paper on the structuring of information about health and illness. Here a population is presently engaged in creating a grammar and rhetoric of health culture and life style that begins to link its own traditions to what it learns of medical scientific method, both in praxis and from media fare on the 'discourse' of medical science. We follow this thought modality in exploration of therapeutic choices and the evolving of ethnotherapies.