Book presentation: Mental health is political – by Piero Cipriano

The book presentation will be conducted by Grazia Di Michele, who will guide the audience through a meeting dedicated to the themes, atmospheres, and narrative path of the work.

Mental health is a political matter, yet it is rarely told, let alone addressed, in these terms. In advanced capitalist societies, it is more often managed than understood. This happens not only in the wards and secure facilities but also through increasingly extensive diagnoses and the systematic use of psychotropic drugs that silence symptoms: new forms of the same asylum that Franco Basaglia managed to close.

In this book, Piero Cipriano – a psychiatrist with extensive experience in public services – tells what it means today to deal with mental health in Italy and the West. He retraces the history of psychiatry, questions the logic that separates the “normal” from the “deviant,” and dismantles the rhetoric that reduces distress to individual malfunction, ignoring its social dimension.

Mental health is political is also the story of a real possibility of change that has been removed from contemporary discourse:

• The unfinished psychedelic revolution: a movement now widely absorbed and normalized by the market.
• The need for meaning and transcendence: dimensions that psychiatry tends to expel in the name of a clinical realism rigidly aligned with capitalist realism.

What happens when care is reduced to mere containment? What remains of mental health if it is compressed solely into diagnoses, pills, and protocols?

At stake is not only the fate of so-called patients, but also the very way in which a society defines what is acceptable, what is pathological, and what can be said. After thirty years of practice, Cipriano takes the floor to denounce a fact as evident as it is repressed: dealing with mental health means, first of all, being able to read the signs of our time and the contradictions they produce.

The Author

Piero Cipriano, born in Irpinia in 1968, lives in Rome. A psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a cognitive-behavioral and ethno-psychiatric background, after working in Mental Health Departments in various Italian regions, he spent seventeen years in a Roman SPDC. Today he works in a SerD in the capital.

Main works and activities:

• Critical essays on the psychiatric structure: Author of The Reluctance Trilogy and Basaglia and the Metamorphoses of Psychiatry.
• Unconventional care practices: He has deepened medical research in volumes such as Ayahuasca and Healing the World and Short Life of Psychiatry from Asylum to Psychedelia.
• Educational background: He is a lecturer in the first Italian master’s degree in psychedelic therapies.