What does psychology have to do with social sciences? Eugenia Campanella is a psychologist in her second year of her PhD in Education in Contemporary Society (ESC) at the Department of Human Sciences for Education “Riccardo Massa” at UniMiB. She tells us that these two disciplines intersect in more than one way, because mental health requires quality of life. However, mental health care practices are still too focused on the clinical manifestations of suffering and do not give enough weight to the social and economic problems that are often the causes of that suffering. Talking to her about her research, Campanella reminds us that psychologists and psychiatrists have an unavoidable political role in our societies because, in pursuing the psychological well-being of individuals, they must also work to improve their conditions. And there are those who, following in the footsteps of Franco Basaglia, are translating this important message into concrete practices.
Let's start with your doctoral thesis. What are you working on?
I am researching community clinics in Italy: I study the practices these clinics develop for community mental health care and the clinical and social effects of this care. Usually, the services of community clinics are aimed at marginalized people who do not have access to the national health system. In turn, I analyze the mechanisms of activation, participation, and mutualism that these realities trigger in the population, but I would like to point out that my perspective remains a clinical one.
Are you referring to your training?
Yes, I like to define myself as a clinical psychologist who, in order to do her job, necessarily inserts herself into a social context. I specialized in clinical psychology, but during my postgraduate internship I found myself working in a local neuropsychiatric center based in a peripheral area of Milan. I have always had the Basaglia school in mind when considering mental health as a multifactorial condition, which is also affected by a person's socioeconomic status: clinical investigation of psychological suffering is inevitably incomplete if it does not take into account that mental health is not determined solely by the individual's mental and intrapsychic processes, but also by the concrete quality of their life, the richness of their relationships, and their material possibilities for self-realization. This is an issue that has always been close to my heart and has led me over the years to become involved in many initiatives born out of activism and the world of associations, that informal, non-institutionalized world which, however, in the field of mental health, has a concrete presence among people, remaining in close contact with communities and their needs.
It seems natural, then, that you made it the subject of your PhD.
Actually, my arrival at the doctoral program was rather accidental. After working for several years as a psychologist, I collaborated with the philosophy department at the University of Milan on research on the right to education for people with learning disabilities and disabilities. During that period, I specialized in the drafting and implementation of European projects, especially in the field of learning and metacognition. It is common for psychologists to work with learning, and I too became interested in pedagogy and its integrated approach to individual development. In carrying out these projects, I also realized how the academic world can, and therefore must, actively serve society by proposing innovative solutions to people's problems that are effective because they are corroborated by research results.
In the wake of these projects and the sensitivity they instilled in me, I arrived at Bicocca, in the Department of Education, to collaborate with Prof. Guido Veronese and the He.Co.Psy laboratory he directs. We wrote the project TInGLE-Academia - Through an Intersectional and Gendered Lens to Equality in Academia, which was funded and is still ongoing, promoting gender issues and intersectionality in university contexts. From there, a colleague suggested that I enroll in a PhD program as a natural continuation of my career path. I thought about it and decided that if I did apply for a PhD, I would do so for a project that was close to my heart and where I could put my experience to good use. It was 2022, and the pandemic had exposed many institutional shortcomings in terms of strategies to combat psychological distress. I had participated in several grassroots initiatives that sought to compensate for these shortcomings, so for the doctoral competition I drew inspiration from that experience and presented a research project that aimed to categorize and map grassroots clinics in Italy. At first, it was supposed to be a purely quantitative study, partly due to my professional background, but I gradually integrated qualitative methods.
Didn't you initially consider using qualitative methods?
Clinical psychology today is heavily based on quantitative data analysis, so at first I imagined a similar approach: a systematic census of Italian community clinics to categorize them, analyze who was involved and who used them, study their geographical distribution, and identify any correlations between different factors. I was convinced that this was the only way to extract convincing information, but after my first year of doctoral studies, I changed my mind and now I work with mixed methods. For example, I decided not to limit myself to mapping, but to focus on three community clinics with different levels of institutionalization: a completely informal and self-managed clinic, a semi-formal clinic that collaborates with institutions, and a clinic that has an agreement with the public sector. Over the past two years, I have studied these three realities through interviews and focus groups with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of their clinical approach and interpersonal dynamics, both among those who provide the service and those who use it. This research requires spending a lot of time in these realities. The aim is to understand whether they can represent case studies for new practices in psychology and psychiatry that also have an impact on social networks as well as on individuals, recognizing the strong interactions between psychological well-being and integration into society.
The question may sound naive, but what have you discovered so far?
I am currently in the process of gathering material and analyzing everything I have collected, so I am cautious, but I have certainly found a substantial absence of the Basaglia approach in local health practices. Community clinics create psychological and social support networks precisely to fill this institutional void. In these contexts, it is easy to see that suffering must be understood and investigated not only through its clinical expressions but also on the social level of the individual: for example, we cannot talk about the mental health of young people without considering the strong pressures they face in terms of economics, housing, and work, or the effect of the individualistic and competitive dynamics of our society on their stress levels. Basaglia understood that isolation from the rest of society, which was achieved through mental hospitals, aggravated mental distress and had to be overcome. I believe that Basaglia's revolution has been historicized around the great achievement of the abolition of mental hospitals with Law 180 of 1978, but that nevertheless psychiatry has not fully taken up his legacy in terms of practice and research. Indeed, it can be said that asylum practices still exist to combat mental distress, such as the degrading forms of detention in many Italian prisons and detention and repatriation centers, the incidence of suicide and abuse of psychotropic drugs in those contexts, or in general to how the psychological effects of marginalization are largely ignored by political agendas and little studied by psychiatric research in Italy. While it was almost by chance that I started my PhD, I don't think it's a coincidence that I'm doing it in a department of education.
Have you found a different approach in this department?
The study of environmental factors that contribute to a given human condition is an integral part of pedagogical research, and the breadth of this perspective is also a great inspiration for those of us who work in mental health. In my opinion, those who work in education today study suffering by considering all aspects of a person's life and can therefore offer many ideas to my field for developing clinical and social support practices. It was in this department that I discovered enlightening theories such as Ignacio Martín-Baró's Psychology of Liberation and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which reveal the close connections between an individual's psychological condition and the socio-political, cultural, and historical context in which they live. The pedagogical perspective allows psychologists to ideally step outside the intimacy of the psychotherapy session and recognize all the other fronts on which action is needed to combat distress. In this sense, I believe that psychologists who have truly internalized Basaglia's lesson cannot shirk their political role, because they are aware that psychological well-being also depends on the mitigation of social problems.
This view of the psychologist and psychiatrist as figures capable of social and political action is not self-evident, at least in the shared imagination.
Basaglia said, quoting Gramsci, that the pessimism of reason is fought with the optimism of practice. Psychologists are political subjects because if they work for people's mental health, and to this end interpret their needs, they cannot shirk from exerting pressure to guarantee their dignity and opportunities for growth. I follow the issue of participation in contemporary societies very closely and in my research on community clinics, I have realized, for example, that although political participation has lost its physicality, manifesting itself more often in online interactions than through physical actions, informal processes of education for physical participation are established in community clinics: by offering support to their local area, people become part of a community project that brings together different subjectivities, in terms of age and education. It is not uncommon to meet retired psychotherapists working side by side with young activists, or even people from very different cultural backgrounds who, without these initiatives, would perhaps have no other opportunity to interact and exchange ideas. Obviously, these interactions are not always easy, but they create intergenerational transmission of knowledge that in turn trains people to listen, cooperate, and mediate. These are real experiences of social cohesion, which I also find at the departmental level.
Are you referring to daily exchanges with people in the department?
Yes, the world of research is an environment that facilitates the exchange of ideas and must actively promote it. The very fact of working among students brings me into contact with the thinking of the younger generation, and as researchers we have a duty to stimulate dialogue with this section of the population through concrete initiatives. For example, my laboratory has organized, among other things, a series of Bell Hooks Lectures open to students from outside our department. I am also thinking of the seminar Si può pensare altro, si deve fare altro ("We can think differently, we must do differently"), which we organized from the ground up in November 2024 to mark the centenary of Franco Basaglia, which was also a wonderful experience of working with students from various fields. No place of knowledge production can ignore its social role as a driver of ideas and promoter of horizontal participation in collective reasoning. I find that exchange is also one of the most beautiful parts of the peer-review process for scientific publications: I always appreciate reviews that do not spare suggestions and corrections, because that is where I test my methods and results and push my thinking beyond my own point of view. Perhaps the fact that I had other work experience prior to my PhD also helps me to manage the manuscript review and validation process with greater serenity. I see it calmly as an epistemological process in which receiving a correction is not equivalent to rejection. I tend to avoid the anxiety-inducing logic that we call 'publish or perish', because I keep in mind that my work is funded by public money and that publishing means giving back to society the results of this investment. The quality of what you publish is the first constraint to be respected and must not be sacrificed in the name of productivity. Furthermore, working closely with informal contexts, in my field knowledge is not only distilled in peer-reviewed publications, but also in non-institutional initiatives, in books written by non-academics, in the very stories you can gather in participatory realities.
Have you had academic experience at other Italian or foreign universities?
So far, I have always been in Milan. It was not a conscious choice on my part, and now, at almost 33, I recognize that it has its limitations, especially for those who do field research among people. I feel that the time has come to go and gain experience outside Milan, and perhaps even outside Italy. For my PhD, I have established and maintained relationships with activists and researchers in Thessaloniki, at the University of St Andrews and The Red Clinic in the UK, in Germany, Palestine, and Kurdistan, among others. Furthermore, my PhD requires a period abroad, so it will be a necessary step, but I claim the advantage of knowing the reality I am studying in depth, because being rooted in the reality you study is an important prerequisite for doing research in this field. And then, politically speaking, focusing on my own territory reminds me that marginality is very close to us, there is no need to go far. Although my experience is geographically limited, in my exchanges with other countries I have found surprising similarities in practices and approaches, to the point that I would go so far as to point out an internationalist dimension to grassroots initiatives to combat mental distress: we must draw inspiration from practices in other parts of the world and share our own, because they respond to problems that are present in all human societies.
Do you plan to continue your career as a researcher?
I'm not sure. I'm afraid that the utilitarian logic I see creeping into Italian research funding policies risks ignoring projects like mine in the long run, which objectively contribute to society but have little economic and technological return. However, I believe that this PhD is an important step in my personal journey, which will be useful even if I am unable to continue my research. I really enjoy research, and I also feel that I am good at it, but I do not have the ambition to make a career out of it and feel that I am more useful to society as a psychologist. I hope that two messages will emerge from my journey: the first is that, especially in a university department that, among other things, trains future teachers and therefore actively contributes to the health of our democracy, the research we do here is meaningful because it brings messages and improvements to civil society, regardless of whether it is done by me or by other people. For this reason, it deserves to be supported as much as medical and engineering research, and the professional status of us doctoral students also deserves greater recognition. The other message I would like to convey is that psychology can serve the social sciences and must incorporate their methods, becoming a social science itself.