Mat Savelli, Beyond ideological platitudes: socialism and psychiatry in Eastern Europe, in: Palgrave Communications volume 4, Article number: 45 (2018) (Open access)

Abstract
For both contemporaneous commentators and historians, psychiatry within what was Communist Europe has largely been discussed through the prism of politics and ideology. Recently, scholars have begun to debate the extent to which psychiatric practices within post-WWII Eastern Europe were beholden to the ideological aspirations of the political elite. This paper enters into these debates by suggesting the need for more nuance in how historians analyse the relationship between ideology and psychiatry in this context. Specifically, it argues that there is a need to differentiate between psychiatric practices that were socialist by design—where professional knowledge was theoretically guided by ideological considerations—and those that were socialist by default—where practices were shaped by the socialist context without being meaningfully inspired by ideology. In order to demonstrate these distinctions, this paper reflects upon psychiatric developments within Communist Yugoslavia (1945–1991). By drawing a clearer distinction between “socialist by design” and “socialism by default”, it becomes easier to reconnect Eastern Europe to the broader historiography of twentieth century psychiatry, while simultaneously providing new insights into the experience of state-sponsored Communism.

Mat Savelli
McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada

Open Access: https://rdcu.be/bUVpM 

Julian Chehirian, Excavating the Psyche: A Social History of Soviet Psychiatry in Bulgaria, in: Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 42/2, 2018, pp 449–480.

Abstract

This article investigates how an imported Soviet psychiatric model affected Bulgarians who experienced psychological crisis by examining therapeutic possibilities that were available and foreclosed in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Bulgarians struggling with psychological disorders in the present day experience polar forms of marginalization: non-recognition on one extreme, and chronic medicalization on the other. Both tendencies can be traced to the Communist-period remodeling of mental healthcare, which outlawed private practice and individual-centered therapy, which reified empirically observable, physiological underpinnings of pathology while suppressing therapies that engaged with the existential context of mental illness. I argue that the reproduction of a Soviet psychiatric model instigated a modernization process but failed to anticipate the idiosyncrasy of economic and social conditions within the country. Furthermore, that this model rejected a therapeutic focus on the individual but developed no effective alternative for identifying and treating subjective characteristics of mental illness. Bulgaria’s history of psychiatry has received little scholarly attention beyond Bulgarian psychiatrists who documented the development of their field. This article presents archival, literary and oral history footholds towards the development of a social history of Bulgarian psychiatry—a perspective that is especially and problematically missing.

Keywords
Bulgarian psychiatry Social history Soviet psychiatry Psychotherapy Anthropology of mental illness

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-017-9559-2