Elvezio Pirfo, The coercion in psychiatry. The clinical practice between treatment and guarantee

In Western societies, since the Middle Ages, it has been impossible to “separate” the psychiatric phenomenon/disease, which has dis-behavioral interrelations, from the “social” values that they were taking on little by little.
In respect of madness, before, and mental disease, then, there have always been some “special” Laws which have often been adopted even before the development of strictly technical choices and, to a considerable extent, they have influenced, forced, pushed, modified them.
The operators in the field are then obliged to take into account the different and simultaneous “observation summits”, including the one regarding the need to act in the absence of the consent of the patient and to assess his/her “social dangerousness”, related to the disease itself: in other words, the return of Psychiatry to the ancient theme of coercion.
The Essay intends to “enter” this grey, confusing area, between treatment and supervision, which has required and is inducing traumatic changes from the point of view of professional culture in addition to work, study and education changes.

 

Published on: Sense and action in education, N. 21 New Series – Year XI 2015