Former Fellows

Bulgarian psychiatric history is, to a significant extent, an empty spot. What exists locally pertains to sanitized history written by psychiatrists themselves. The lasting impression, is they cannot, or do not, want to say what has happened, what has been the private, political, material, scientific, life of the psychiatric field. The first objective would be to reconstruct the boundary maintaining mechanisms of the socialist psychiatry in Bulgaria. The second objective would be to trace the intersections of several different lines of development– juridical framework, type and dynamics of the services, the “material” milieu. The third objective is to throw some light on issues which were among the forbidden topics during the period – suicide and psychiatric abuse. Not many documentsabout psychiatry have been preserved, archives have been destroyed, and there was ideological pushing forward of people without real contribution and the contribution of others was ignored, especially from the period before 1944. The study will use as many sources as possible and combine various qualitative methods, including archival material, and key professional journals during the period, medical press. Another source of data would be interviews conducted with representatives of the generation, whose professional lives are situated predominantly in the socialist period.