Madness in the home. Family care and welfare policies before fascism

In the history of the last two centuries of madness, families’ attitudes are mainly described as getting rid of their insane members: by handing them over to the new professionals within special institutions or abandoning them because of the impossibility of supporting them. Increasingly, the family distanced itself. Yet the experts on mental diseases seemed to agree with such distancing: the idea of ‘curability’ was connected with institutionalisation, because a mentally ill person would benefit precisely from being isolated from his/her usual environment and therefore from the family. But the asylum was neither the unique nor the ideal place for the treatment of mentally ill people. Their own family home might be better. This was the quite surprising statement that eminent psychiatrists, such as Cesare Lombroso and Augusto Tamburini, offered when the first Italian law on insanity was being drafted.