​​​​​​​Psychiatry and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Representation of Mental Illness in Scientific Literature and in Contemporary Italian Narrative Literature - December 2026

General presentation

On December 3–4, 2026 at University Paris Nanterre, will take place this international conference focusing on contemporary forms of writing about mental illness and psychological distress in Italy. 

By closing Italy’s psychiatric asylums and reorienting care practices toward a patient-centered approach, Law 180 of May 13, 1978—known as the “Basaglia Law”—brought about a profound reconfiguration of collective perceptions of madness and mental illness. From this turning point onward, contemporary Italian narrative literature has gradually incorporated these transformations, establishing the writing about mental illness as a literary field in its own right. This field is traversed by a plurality of discursive instances (medical, autobiographical, activist) that contribute to redefining, problematizing, or challenging the categories of the dominant psychiatric discourse.

The central aim of this academic conference is to demonstrate that fiction, personal accounts, or documentary narratives are not merely passive reflections of clinical reality. On the contrary, they constitute a major epistemological tool. These forms of writing offer a unique space to give visibility to marginalized subjects, actively contribute to the destigmatization of psychological suffering in the public sphere, and enrich the categories of traditional psychiatric discourse through an approach attentive to lived and human experience.

To this end, the symposium brings together complementary approaches from the fields of literature, law, clinical practice, psychosocial studies, and psychometrics. By fostering interaction between literature, psychiatry, psychology, narrative medicine, and the social sciences, this initiative aims to lay the theoretical and methodological foundations for a future large-scale international research program, developed within the framework of the European EDUC Alliance.

 

Presentation of the project

By closing Italy’s psychiatric asylums and reorienting care practices toward a patient-centered approach, Law 180 of May 13, 1978—known as the “Basaglia Law”—brought about a
profound reconfiguration of collective perceptions of madness and mental illness. From this turning point onward, contemporary Italian narrative literature has gradually incorporated
these transformations, establishing the writing about mental illness as a literary field in its own right.
This field is traversed by a plurality of discursive instances (medical, autobiographical, activist) that contribute to redefining, problematizing, or challenging the categories of the
dominant psychiatric discourse. 

From this perspective, literary fiction emerges as an epistemological tool of paramount importance: it offers a unique perspective on the experience of psychological suffering and enables us to give a voice and restore visibility to those whom psychiatry has all too often silenced. Far from being a mere mirror of reality, fiction has the capacity to model situations that are not necessarily validated by clinical reality, thereby contributing to the production of a more articulated and nuanced understanding of mental disorders. It also facilitates the transition from the private to the public sphere, contributes to the process of destigmatizing experiences that have long been silenced by society, and paves the way for forms of empathetic understanding of the emotional states of people suffering from mental disorders.

It is within this space of theoretical and disciplinary intersection that this study day is situated, its distinctiveness lying in the interconnection of three complementary analytical levels.

The first is literary, interpretive, and legal in nature: A. Benucci and G. Pias (UPN) will analyze the forms, figures, and narrative devices through which mental illness is portrayed in contemporary Italian fiction, with particular attention paid to the ways in which literature contributes to the processes of decolonization and demystification of psychiatric discourse; C. Savi (UPN) will offer a contribution on the legal framework regarding the management of mental disorders in Italy, providing the tools necessary to understand the legal and institutional conditions within which these literary representations are situated; S. Redaelli (University of Warsaw) will extend the analysis to the field of narrative medicine and writings on illness. C. Taraborelli (University of Warsaw) will also present a talk dedicated to the ways in which contemporary narrative writing has depicted the pandemic experience, examining the relationships between psychological suffering, the metaphorical construction of the disease, and the redefinition of the boundaries between personal accounts, documentary narrative, and literary fiction.

The second level, of a clinical nature, will be represented by the presentation by P. Milone, a psychiatrist and writer who practiced at a mental health center and later in a hospital psychiatric ward in Genoa—whose work *L’arte di legare le persone* (Einaudi, 2021; French trans. L’art de lier les êtres, Calmann-Lévy, 2023) is a prime example of a rare convergence between literary writing and psychiatric knowledge—who will explore the role of narration in the therapeutic relationship and in the process of constructing the patient’s subjectivity.

The third level, of a psychosocial and psychometric nature, will be developed by the team from the University of Cagliari: M. Agus (psychometrician) will present a lexical analysis
of narrative corpora related to specific pathologies, opening an original methodological path between text sciences and quantitative approaches in the humanities; C. Cabras
(social psychologist) will examine strategies for promoting well-being through literary text and present data on the psychological distress of students at Italian universities.

The concluding roundtable, moderated by S. Rossi (University of Lorraine), will finally serve as a moment of synthesis of the three levels of analysis, allowing for the identification of the main guiding principles for the definition of a future interdisciplinary research project within the framework of the EDUC Alliance.

 

Project Leaders

- Giuliana Pias (Assistant Professor of Italian), Paris Nanterre University, gpias@parisnanterre.fr
- Alessandro Benucci (Assistant Professor of Italian), Paris Nanterre University, abenucci@parisnanterre.fr
- Cristina Cabras (Associate Professor of Social Psychology), University of Cagliari, ccabras@unica.it
- Mirian Agus (Associate Professor of Psychometrics and Neuroscience), University of Cagliari, mirian.agus@unica.it