Zen Meditation in an Open Public Mental Health Institution

The experience illustrated has been realised in Trieste in an open public mental health institution, where the practice of zazen, Zen meditation, was offered. It was initially realised in the psychiatric institution, a lunatic asylum called phrenocomion, built by the Austrian empress Maria Theresia, at the end of the eighteenth century. In the 1970s, Franco Basaglia, taking the position of director, developed his ideas for an innovative psychiatry as de-institutionalised open institution. It now hosts the Department of Mental Health of the National Health Service together with the Department of Psychology of Trieste University. It symbolises ideally the place where the suffering of persons with mental ailments encounters the psychiatrists and psychologists involved in their care, being an ideal place for experiencing the application of Buddhist principles and meditation with subjects suffering from mental ailments. This approach started in 2014, with extremely varied outcomes. Part of the subjects were deeply involved, with significant positive changes and improvements which impressed the staff members involved. The illustration of these experiences will be reported in a narrative perspective, which appears to be the most adequate way to represent the richness and variety of individual existential and meditative experiences.