Freedom's Italian edition, Diritti dell'Uomo, broke the first news of horrifying experiments conducted in a mental hospital near Milano. After decades of psychiatric inhumanity in Italy, Freedom's investigations inspired the official shutdown of the repugnant asylums and a nationwide movement to end the use of shock treatment.

The headlines were electrifying: “Mummified Corpses of Patients, Heads Kept Whole in Formaldehyde—A True Museum of Horrors”. Beginning on February 2, 1980, media throughout Italy broke the news of Freedom‘s exposé of a psychiatric museum of horrors discovered at the Mombello Asylum.

Within days, the country had heard of the mummified remains of patients left on display for decades, but through Freedom‘s continuing coverage, they soon learned much more about the past and present abuses of the psychiatric profession. For Freedom‘s Italian edition, Diritti dell‘Uomo, was also at the time investigating the unscientific underpinnings of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), or shock treatment. Tailored for use on humans by psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti, the treatment was based on methods used in slaughterhouses to paralyse pigs for the kill.

Over the past 20 years, Diritti dell‘Uomo has revealed countless human rights abuses perpetrated against Italian citizens in mental institutions, facilities that have reaped huge profits for the psychiatrists involved. Aided by Diritti dell‘Uomo‘s vigilance, the Italian chapter of Citizens Commission on Human Rights, working in concert with members of parliament, have raided the nation‘s forgotten insane asylums, locating thousands of people who were confined against their will, living like animals, often naked, locked in rooms with peeling walls, beds covered with human waste. In 1996 alone, one government resolution ordered patients of 97 asylums relocated so they could, for the first time in their lives, be taught to read, write, work and care for themselves.

Diritti dell‘Uomo‘s ongoing investigation into a proposed law to criminalise “mental manipulation” in Italy has opened the door to a back room coalition of psychiatrists and anti-religionists who threaten to take human rights in Italy back to the country‘s darkest days of fascism. Its December 2004 report shows just how far the mental health industry will go to destroy any challenge to its government appropriations—and eliminate any free voice that could upset that monopoly.