Mental, Social and Visual Alienation in D’Alessandro’s Photography

This chapter analyzes the first of several photobooks that illustrated the reform of psychiatric health care in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s: Luciano D’Alessandro’s 1969 Gli esclusi. In 1967, D’Alessandro was invited by the director of the asylum of Nocera Superiore, Sergio Piro, to document through photography the abysmal conditions of the “total institution” that was the pre-reform mental hospital. D’Alessandro first published a small selection of photos, in Popular Photography Italiana (1967), which he then expanded in Gli esclusi. This chapter claims that, in the evolution between the two publications, we can read the complex and multilayered notion of alienation that informed the work of reform, especially that of one of the most famous figures associated with it, Franco Basaglia. By analyzing D’Alessandro’s Gli esclusi through the notion of alienation, this chapter lets what Sekula calls the conditions of “readability” of the photographic message emerge

The mover-stayer model for the HIV/AIDS epidemic in action

Short- and medium-term projections of the HIV/AIDS epidemic indicators are of great interest to those evaluating the needs for health care and prevention interventions. We developed a simulation procedure to obtain forecasts of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and used it to estimate the characteristic regional parameters of the epidemic in Italy. The simulation procedure is based on a hybrid compartmental model, in which the epidemic evolves via nonrandom mixing patterns. Because of its structure, the model is suitable for policy making; in particular, for evaluating prevention campaigns, alternate forms of health care for people with AIDS, and drug supply-needs. The model will also be used to estimate the number of intravenous drug users in Italy and the number of AIDS cases not reported or reported with a delay to the Italian surveillance system

Compartmental models for health care to chronic patients. An application to health care to patients with AIDS

Models of health care to chronic patients can provide useful tools in public health policy making, on the basis of simulations of different scenarios and quantitative information. The present paper illustrates a general setting of compartmental, stochastic modelling of health care to chronic patients that includes the possibility of evaluating quantities and costs of resources involved in the care process. A specific application to AIDS patients is also presented, along with technical details on the models implemented and the whole range of results obtained

Tree-structured analysis of survival data - Search for latent diagnostic factors in a tumour study

This paper presents a possible solution to the problem of identification of factors influencing long-term survival patients, using regression trees. The separation of the two classes of long-term survivors (cured patients) and of failed-to-cure patients is generalized to l* classes of survivors and is carried out via a latent variable, whose determinations are provided by the regression-tree classification. Two sets of factors are thus identified within the set of covariates: the factors influencing the prognosis and those influencing the survival classification (diagnostic factors). The relationship between the two sets is then explored, both theoretically and using an application to a data set of multiple myeloma patients. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd