In an era that transforms every suffering into an individual problem to be managed privately, the three-day Brigata Bsaglia - ConTatto- 2026 event represented a countercurrent. Not just a festival, not a specialist conference on mental health, but a political and human experiment that brought a radical question back to the forefront: who really cares? And above all, what does it mean to care in a society that systematically produces hardship, isolation, and violence? The fifth edition of the event, organized by the Brigata Basaglia in Milan, took place in the liberated spaces of the Collettivo Kasciavìt, confirming a conviction that has informed the collective's work for years: "It's not just the clinic that cures." A phrase that encompasses an entire worldview and opposes the contemporary tendency to medicalize every form of suffering, reducing social, economic, and political problems to individual issues to be treated through diagnoses and psychotropic drugs.
For three days, ConTatto brought together activists, practitioners, artists, people with direct experience of mental distress, and organizations committed to fighting for rights. A network of practices and knowledge that sought to build what institutions often forget: places of encounter, mutual listening, productive conflict, and solidarity.The insight that informed Franco Basaglia's experience continues to resonate powerfully.
"Freedom is therapeutic," argued the Venetian psychiatrist who led the process that culminated in the closure of mental hospitals. An often-quoted phrase, yet one that still retains an extraordinary capacity to interrogate the present. If freedom heals, then suffering cannot be separated from the material and political conditions in which people live.
Mental health cannot be discussed while ignoring precarious work, exploitation, poverty, wars, racism, gender violence, or environmental devastation.
In a society that constantly demands adaptation, suffering is often interpreted as an individual's inability to keep up with the imposed pace. The dominant response is well-known: diagnostic labels, standardized protocols, and the growing use of psychotropic drugs. Tools that can play an important role in some situations, but which too often risk becoming devices of normalization. The problem isn't the person who can't cope with unsustainable conditions; the problem becomes the conditions themselves.
ConTatto has attempted to overturn this perspective. Don't ask for BRIGATA BASAGLIA. ConTatto 2026.
Care as collective resistance: how individuals adapt to a system that produces suffering, but how they build relationships, communities, and practices capable of transforming that system. Care that doesn't mean control, but rather the possibility of sharing vulnerability and desires, anger and hope.
Franca Ongaro wrote that "illness is not merely a biological fact, but a condition that takes on meaning within specific social relationships." This reflection seems particularly timely in an era in which mental distress is growing alongside the erosion of collective bonds. If distress also arises from social relationships, then care cannot be confined to a doctor's office or a health service: it must span territories, communities, and spaces of gathering and struggle.
This is why the dialogue with organizations like Disability Pride Milano and the support of Radio Aut Pavia was not simply a moment of organizational collaboration, but an integral part of a vision that considers health as a collective reality. Healing emerges from alliances, from building networks of mutual support, from the ability to imagine worlds other than those presented to us as inevitable.
In the Basaglia Brigade's final message, a crucial word appears: radicality. Not as ideological extremism, but as a desire to get to the root of problems. In a historical context marked by growing inequality, underpaid and unprotected jobs, and wars and genocides across the globe, psychological suffering cannot be viewed as a simply private matter. It also reflects a reality that too often demands obedience and adaptation rather than justice and dignity.
ConTatto 2026 reminded us that another possibility exists. A popular healing born from encounters between people, from collective organization, from culture, art, and social struggles. A healing that does not deny pain but removes it from isolation. A healing that does not require us to become more functional to a violent system, but to jointly build the conditions to transform it.
Perhaps this is the most vivid legacy of Basaglia and all the experiences that continue to draw inspiration from his work: remembering that mental health is inseparable from freedom, social justice, and the real possibility of participating in building one's own world. And that no therapy can replace what happens when people come together, recognize one another, and decide not to leave anyone alone.
Gabriel Cammarata.
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/wp-content/uploads/giugno2026_compressed-1.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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