STEFANO COSTANZO
TRAVEL AND LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
Project | Series
Asylum
Modern psychiatric hospitals or common called “Asylum” evolved from, and eventually replaced the older lunatic asylums. The development of the modern psychiatric hospital is also the story of the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry.
In Italy, everything began at the beginning of the twentieth century, in 1904 to be specific, when a law was issued to regulate the management of this kind of facilities. Mentally ill and dangerous people were locked in asylums. During these dark early days of mental hospitals, mental patients, people with physical disabilities, drunks, prostitutes and homosexuals were all somehow packed in together and locked away.
It was only in the late 1950s, that society started to disapprove the asylums banning them as places where people lost their identity, humanity and dignity.
In 1978, the Basaglia Law (Franco Basaglia was a psychiatrist and an Italian neurologist) which revolutionized the mental health service in Italy, contained directives for the closing down of all psychiatric hospitals and gradually led to their replacement with social cooperatives. This process took several years for cultural, social and logistics reasons but the Basaglia Law still represents the basis of Italian mental health legislation.
Nowadays, patients with mental health conditions are admitted to public hospitals, although prison is sometimes an option for the most dangerous ones. Old asylums are now just abandoned places.
This project called “Asylums” was born to help us remember these institutions, where people spent years suffering severe physical, cognitive and emotional damages caused by controversial psychiatric treatment. It was said that asylums were built to house and help the mentally ill, but patients often ended up losing their own sanity.
Asylums are one of the favourite places for Urbex lovers, also known as Urban Explorers.
Urbex is the exploration of man-made structures, usually abandoned ruins. "Visit, explore, but don't steal", they say. There is some sort of "code of conduct" Urban Explorers usually adhere to: never state in a public place, such as Facebook or other social medias, the exact locations of these buildings, as there is no way to ensure that we are not dealing with vandals or treasure hunters on the Internet.
All the pictures for this project were taken at 3 different asylums in the north of Italy.
It's pretty common to find strains of equipment or documents dating back 30 years or more. I happened to see utensils, notes, medical files of patients admitted in the 1970s or earlier. Lots of books with warped pages turned yellow because of humidity and dust.
When you explore this kind of buildings, you wound up in very quiet places, almost surreal. If you read stories about what happened in asylums, it is not hard to imagine how much suffering these patients experienced when you consider the inhumane mental health treatments widely used at the time. Electroconvulsive therapy is just one of them.
40 years have passed since the Basaglia law was established and a lot of improvements were made in the treatments for mental disorders. There are still countries, all around the world, still using asylums to treat patients suffering from acute mental illnesses, often with very old and unsafe treatments.