The Institute is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, from which it takes its name – began his career in 1882 as a psychiatric hospital for a donation to the Fathers Fatebenefratelli devoted to caring for the sick alienated.
Works like this for nearly a century until 1978 the year of the psychiatric reform. Early 80s is triggered a profound process of change as it passes through a specific training of the operators, the renovation of the buildings and the activation of experimental projects such as the one that leads to the development of skills and innovative structures for the rehabilitation of people with severe mental disorders and the rehabilitation of people affected by Alzheimer’s disease, a field for which the Institute became part of a pilot project of the Lombardy Region. During the same years are activated rehabilitation services for elderly day care. Start with this process of major change an intense scientific research that contributes to the recognition of the Institute as an Institute of Hospitalization and Care Scientific for psychiatric rehabilitation and rehabilitation of Alzheimer’s disease December 19, 1996 with the name of founder of the Brothers Hospitallers Centro San Giovanni di Dio – Fatebenefratelli.
Institute in addition to inpatient units, day hospital, psychiatric residential facilities for surgeries and sees the various organizational units of active research – either in the form of real laboratories such as those of genetics, neurobiology, neuroimaging, neurophysiology and neuropsychology of that team, such as the psycho-social and clinical research on Alzheimer’s disease-that engage a large number of researchers and young scholars.