‘Nothing About You Without Us!’
‘Nothing About You Without Us!’

The Social Psychiatry Project in Socialist Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses how social psychiatry in Bulgaria was framed and mobilized by the psychiatric elite under state socialism and argues that it functioned through a dual stake. Social psychiatry was asserted and promoted by the psychiatric community; in practice, however, it was reformulated for the latter’s practical needs. This resulted in a convenient inversion: it was not the social that penetrated into the psychiatric system so as to subvert it from within; it was the psychiatric system – as a medical undertaking at that – which was to penetrate into the whole social body so as to keep it healthy, treat and cure, closely monitor, and never abandon it. The author argues further that this was a case of appropriation of an emancipatory, in its essence, project, which was reworked for local purposes and reduced to an adjunct of the medicalized paternalistic model. Just as social psychiatry was medicalized and ‘paternalized’ to the benefit of the psychiatric field itself, so too it may turn out nowadays that the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) serves primarily the expert professions, while service-users remain mostly in the passive dependent position of objects of care.

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