AGRA PUBLICATIONS is organizing the presentation of KATERINA MATSA’s new book.

THE HISTORY OF 18 ANO
A STORY OF SELF-RELIANCE AND EMANCIPATION,
WITH NO EXPIRY DATE

on Wednesday 4 March 2026 at 19.00
at A. Tritsis Hall 
of  CITY OF ATHENS CULTURAL CENTRE
Akadimias 50, Athens

The following speakers will discuss the book:

DIMITRIS YFANTIS
PhD in Sociology, State Award for Testimony-Chronicle 2024

GERASIMOS PAPANASTASATOS
Dr. Sociology – Criminology

SAVAS MICHAEL
author

KATERINA MATSA
psychiatrist, former director of 18ANO

18 ANO IT ITS 40 YEARS OF OPERATION, has proven in practice that “there is an alternative,” that “drug addicts can get well,” as long as they find the treatment program that suits them. Thousands of addicts have recovered, found their way in life, a path of emancipation, creativity, and struggle. That is why 18 ANO, along with other public and free drug rehabilitation programs, has become a target of government policy. That is why the government rushed to pass, in the middle of summer, despite strong reactions from all stakeholders and the majority of society, the law that privatizes mental health and addiction treatment, which demolishes 18 ANO with its philosophy, condemning addicted individuals to remain in the misery of the streets, “invisible.”

That is why we are recording the HISTORY OF 18 ANO, starting from its first steps in Dafni, in the climate of social unrest during the transition to democracy, collective struggles, hopes and disappointments for a truly radical psychiatric reform. In the climate of the spread of hard drug use in Greek society and the desperate search by more and more people for a place of treatment in the then small 18 ANO. In the climate of the “small revolution” attempted by a handful of people, therapists and patients, who managed, through collective struggles, to put their vision into practice and build a model unit with thirty-three structures throughout Attica, introducing for the first time in Greece special rehabilitation programs, where psychotherapy and art, in their dialectical relationship, become the catalyst for rehabilitation and produce amazing results.

At the Attica Psychiatric Hospital, this resistance gradually took the form of a minority but courageous movement for deinstitutionalization, which rallied young psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, social workers, and other employees.

The founding group, without having a unified ideology, was inspired by the ideas of May and the vision of revolutionary social change. Points of reference were Freud, Lacan, Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, Marx, surrealism, permanent revolution, the anti-authoritarian movement, Franco Basaglia, Félix Guattari, Olivenstein, Laing, Cooper, and other thinkers.

Αbout the author:

Psychiatrist Katerina Matsa was born in 1947 in Nea Artaki, Evia.

She is the wife of Savvas Michael. She studied medicine in Athens and psychiatry in Paris and Athens. She worked at the Attica Psychiatric Hospital from 1974 to 2013. She was the scientific director of the 18ANO Addiction Treatment Unit until her retirement. Since then, she has been involved in the work of the Social Clinics. She is the editor of the journal Tetradia Psichiatrikis

Her books have been published by Agra Publications: We searched for people and found shadows. The enigma of drug addiction (2001), The case of Eurydice. Clinical drug addiction (2006), Psychotherapy and Art in Addiction Recovery. The “Example” of 18ANO (2008), Impossible Mourning and the Crypt. The Drug Addict and Death (2012), Humiliation and Shame. Women Drug Addicts (2013), Outcasts Among Outcasts. Drug Addicts and Psychopathology (2017), Niobe: Impossible Mourning in the Time of Pandemic (2020).