Matti in famiglia. Custodia domestica e manicomio nella Provincia di Firenze (1866-1938)

In the history of last two centuries of the treatment of psychiatric illness, families attitudes are mainly described as ridding themselves of their mentally disturbed members by sending them to an asylum. The more madness became a medical and institutional matter, the more the families seem to disappear. On the basis of unexplored and exceptionally rich archival sources , this essay focuses on the Florentine experience of subsidized “domestic custody” of hundreds of psychiatric patients. Beginning in 1866 and lasting for decades, this family-boarding care system was embraced by prestigious Italian psychiatrists who, as early as at the end of the XIX century, were seeking alternatives to institutionalization. Yet that experience has been somehow overlooked by historiography, which has been occupied mainly with asylums. The role of the families in the interaction with the psychiatrists and the administrators is not simply an additional and marginal chapter in the history of the mental health. These archival findings contradict some of the conventional wisdom in the recent writing of the history of Italian psychiatry; indeed these findings also give rise to new reflections about the present.