2025-01-24

ROME - A grantee of the Local Cross-border Journalism grant programme, Ludovica Jona Lasinio, spoke at the Human Rights Italian Parliamentary Commission yesterday to discuss her findings as a follow-up of the team's investigative project The Business of Madness.

The investigative project sheds light on "how deinstitutionalisation is taking place in 5 regions of 4 different member states: Spain, Italy, Belgium and The Netherlands."

The main focus of the project was to look at people with mental health diseases and how their fundamental rights are still violated in different EU countries, while "physical constraints - tying psychiatric patients to the bed for many hours and even days - are used in all the countries investigated."

Her presence at the plenary meeting happened after the Italian commission started a series of hearings on mechanical restraints following her publication on il Fattoquotidiano website. 

An article published on 10 October 2024 as a follow-up of the investigative project estimated at least 12,000 mechanical restraint episodes are practiced in Italian psychiatric wards for adults every year, while half was previously estimated from a previous document submitted to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in April 2022. According to Ludovica, the article was sent to ECHR in support of the "Lavorgna versus Italy," a case of a young man that was mechanically restrained for 9 days in Italy, which the ECHR condemned in November. 

Photo by Ludovica Jona Lasinio

To watch the plenary session, click here.

To read about the synthesis of the plenary session, click here.

Ludovica Jona Lasinio