Assistenza psichiatrica agli autori di reato in Liguria: una realtà in evoluzione

Introduction

In 1999 a group of psychiatrists of Mental Health Department of Genoa started building up a psychiatric liaison service to the Marassi Institute, the largest prison of Liguria. Over the years, the interest on the issue of forensic psychiatry has been increasing in the Ligurian Mental Health Departments as well as in the meetings of Ligurian Section of Italian Psychiatric Society. At the same time all the aforementioned subjects begun to argue about the shutdown of the forensic hospitals.

Discussion

In the subsequent years the real world psychiatric practice have become increasingly interwoven with legal issues, and nowadays the main questions to address in this field are: the organization of psychiatric care in prisons; the organization of care in the Mental Health Center and Day Hospitals for mentally ill offenders serving their sentence at home; the organization of care in residential facilities as an alternative measure to forensic hospital or imprisonment; the planning of a regional facility, after the shutdown of the forensic hospitals, to admit patients deemed incompetent to proceed by reason of mental insanity, but still at risk of future violence.