documented — ANSA, il Resto del Carlino, BolognaToday, Il Fatto Quotidiano

Mental health: the compulsory treatment order requested and never activated

This is the least reported part of the case, and probably the most important. All the sources for this entry are on page 4, in the block marked TSO.

A note on the term: TSO stands for trattamento sanitario obbligatorio, the Italian compulsory psychiatric treatment order. It is not a police measure but a health measure, and it follows a precisely defined procedure, set out further down.

╔══ THE PATH THROUGH THE SERVICES ══╗

12 JUNE 2026 — CASTELLO D'ARGILE. The first known episode. According to the account of the mayor, Alessandro Erriquez, Fakir had been trying to reach a friend in Cento and got off the bus several kilometres early. He wanders through the town, enters the courtyard of a block of flats near via Guido Rossa, rings a doorbell chosen at random. Some residents call for help. The Carabinieri arrive, along with an ambulance and the mayor himself, who talks with him at length. Fakir appears confused but NOT aggressive, and cooperates with those trying to help him. The crew offer him medical assistance: he refuses to be taken to hospital.

20 JUNE 2026 — BORGO PANIGALE. In the early afternoon the ambulance service treats him in a playground: he has cut his left wrist. In the emergency department of the Maggiore hospital, doctors describe him as alert and oriented, low in mood but calm. IT IS FAKIR HIMSELF WHO ASKS to speak to a psychiatrist.

THE FOLLOWING DAYS — THE MENTAL HEALTH CENTRE. He attends a mental health centre. The doctors make a first diagnosis, confirm a course of treatment and set a second appointment for the first days of August.

19 JULY 2026. He dies in via Italo Svevo. He will never make the August appointment.

In little more than a month, then, Fakir had crossed paths with the public system three times: the Carabinieri and the ambulance service at Castello d'Argile, the emergency department in Bologna, the mental health centre. He had asked for help himself, explicitly. The fourth encounter with the State was the one on 19 July.

╔══ THE ORDER REQUESTED ON THE EMERGENCY LINE AND NEVER ACTIVATED ══╗

According to two witnesses interviewed by BolognaToday, while Fakir was in crisis in via Svevo — hallucinating, injuring himself by striking the asphalt and the garage shutters — a woman who identified herself as a healthcare worker expressly asked the emergency operations room to start the procedure for a compulsory treatment order.

The order was never started.

It is one of the points being examined by investigators, together with the manner of the restraint and the adequacy of the medical response. A compulsory treatment order is issued by decree of the mayor on the reasoned proposal of a doctor, and confirmed by the guardianship judge: it is not something an emergency operations room can activate on its own, but it is the channel through which the request should have been routed to those who could order it.

╔══ THE MEDICAL PROTOCOLS ══╗

For psychiatric emergencies the rule is that the patient must never be left in a prone position, but placed on their side or on their back. The four Red Cross volunteers sent to via Svevo were a basic life support crew: no doctor, no nurse. Trained in resuscitation and in the use of a defibrillator, but without the means to carry out an advanced clinical assessment or to administer drugs to sedate Fakir and shorten the officers' physical restraint.

On 1 August 2026 the Bologna local health authority announced that it would rewrite the ambulance service protocols on handling people in an altered state, setting out when a doctor should be sent. This came after Fakir's death, but it says something about what was not working before.

╔══ WHICH MENTAL HEALTH CENTRE WAS TREATING HIM? ══╗

It is not known. And it is a question that cannot simply be put to anyone.

THE CRITERION. In Italy psychiatric care follows a territorial criterion: the patient is assigned to the mental health centre responsible for the area where they live. Fakir lived in Borgonuovo, a village in the municipality of Sasso Marconi, which falls within the Reno, Lavino and Samoggia district of the Bologna health authority: the corresponding mental health centre is in Casalecchio di Reno, at via Cimarosa 5/2.

THIS IS AN INFERENCE, NOT A VERIFIED FACT. And there are elements that complicate it. On 20 June Fakir was treated in Borgo Panigale and taken to the emergency department of the Maggiore hospital, which is in the city of Bologna: the referral to a mental health centre may have been to the district where he lived or to the one covering the hospital. Moreover, in the preceding months he often slept at the homes of friends and relatives in other parts of the city, including the Pilastro.

WHY THE POINT MATTERS. If a person is registered as living in one municipality but in fact lives elsewhere, territorial care assignment is precisely the point at which continuity of treatment can break down: an appointment set thirty kilometres from where you sleep is an appointment that is easier to miss. The question is not bureaucratic; it concerns whether that course of treatment was practicable at all.

╔══ WHY A JOURNALIST CANNOT SIMPLY ASK THE HEALTH AUTHORITY ══╗

This information cannot be obtained by journalistic means, and not because the health authority is being evasive: it is forbidden by law.

Health data are “special categories of personal data” under Article 9 of European Regulation 2016/679 (GDPR) and enjoy reinforced protection. A health authority may neither confirm nor deny that an identified person was in the care of one of its services: the confirmation itself would be a disclosure of health data. The prohibition does not lapse on the death of the person concerned — Article 2-terdecies of the Italian Privacy Code (legislative decree 196/2003) provides that rights over the data of the deceased may be exercised by those who have an interest of their own or who act to protect the person concerned, that is, in substance, by family members, not by third parties.

To this are added the professional secrecy of healthcare staff, backed by criminal penalties under Article 622 of the Criminal Code, and official secrecy. On the journalist's side, the deontological rules on the processing of personal data in the exercise of journalism, annexed to the Privacy Code, apply: on health data they impose a requirement that the information be essential and that the dignity of the person be respected.

PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCE. The fact can emerge in only two ways: through the family and their lawyer, who may request the medical records as holders of an interest of their own; or through the judicial authority, which may obtain the clinical file as part of the investigation. Not through a journalist's request to the health authority.

This archive therefore flags the question, and also flags that the question has, as things stand, no legitimate channel for a public answer. It is a limit of knowledge, not evasiveness to be denounced.