In Memory of Nino

The Editorial Staff of Vedere Oltre remembers with particular affection Eustachio Loperfido also because of his participation in the Scientific Committee of this issue.

EUSTACHIO LOPERFIDO

Professor Eustachio Loperfido passed away during the cold Easter morning of this year, at the age of 76. He was a pediatric neuropsychiatrist and an administrator for two five-year periods in the 70's and 80's, involved, in quality of councillor of the City of Bologna, in the construction of the new regional socio-sanitary system.
Professor Loperfido has outstandingly contributed to the innovation of many fields, keeping at the centre of his research man in his complexity and within the society of which he is the expression.
“If a city is at the measure of a child, then it is a just city for all", he enjoyed saying. And that notion of “all” led him to do research relating to children and older adults, the world of women with their specific needs, the world of deviance and the world of disability, and to look for relationships between these worlds apparently different, but which are, as he thought, linked together in a unique web.
This conception of man and of his uniqueness, who lives in close relation with the group he belongs to, led him to prefigure a new medicine, and he employed all his energy in overcoming sectorialism in the health field opposing any corporate abuse of power: medicalization, welfarism, psychiatric treatment, in the awareness of the necessity of promoting, maintaining and recovering the physical and mental health of the whole population. Looking

at the man as a whole brought him to imagine a health system that, from being based on welfare, changed to a social integration system which guarantees physical and mental health, creating a web of relations between social and health services with other services on the territory: schooling, leisure time, work, etc.
His imaginative ability sustained by his scientific research and administrative skills (the socio-sanitary consortium of the legal subject of public law was his idea) led him to prefigure some solutions to problems which were then only at the stage of academic reflection. He fought, for example, for the closing of mental hospitals in regards to Law 180 of 1978 or the closing of special classes where children with disabilities ended up isolated and ghettoized, anticipating Law 104 of 1992.
Professor Loperfido had the awareness that a psychiatric patient was the expression of a sociopathology, and represented a symptom of disturbed relations within the group of origin. Consequently, there was the necessity to understand the patient, to understand and cure the pain within the group, discovering its therapeutic potential.
The list of his successes is long. But we wish to conclude with this brief intervention, which highlights a characteristic of the Professor that contains all others: the awareness that with determinant change