Roberto Mezzina
Pioneering Italian psychiatrist who helped lead Trieste’s pioneering shift from psychiatric hospitals to fully community-based, rights-driven care. He directed Trieste’s Department of Mental Health and its WHO Collaborating Centre, shaping international reform. Today he chairs the IMHCN and advises governments worldwide on humane, non-coercive mental health systems.
Areas of interest
- Deinstitutionalisation
- Rights Based Mental Health Reform
- Whole Systems, Whole Community Approach
Roberto Mezzina is a psychiatrist who spent his entire career in the Italian NHS in Trieste (1978–2019), where he helped close the city’s psychiatric hospital and build a wholly alternative, community-based network of care. This pioneering work paved the way for Italy’s 1978 Mental Health Reform, which closed all asylums nationwide. Trieste’s services—operating with open doors and without restraint—were recognised by the World Health Organization in 2021 as a global model of rights-based, person-centred care.
Dr Mezzina became Director of a Community Mental Health Centre in 1995 and served as Director of the Trieste Department of Mental Health from 2012 to 2019. From 2009 he also led the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Trieste. He is co-founder and Chair of the International Mental Health Collaborating Network, and currently Regional Vice President for Europe at the World Federation for Mental Health.
He advises on mental health reform internationally, including recent work with NHS England and the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. His human-rights-focused practice has been recognised with awards from the Zero Project at the UN in Vienna (2014) and the European Personality of the Year Award from GAMIAN-Europe (2017). Dr Mezzina has served as an advisor to WHO, an expert for the EU Joint Action on mental health reform, and a consultant to the World Bank.
