The article represents sociological analytics of the fundamental relation “truth-knowledge” underlying the exercises of the contemporary penal power over “offenders of the law”; it demonstrates in what manner, through the medium of the legal-psychiatric expertise, a criminal stigma on definite individuals is constituted and stabilized into the frameworks of institutional organization of the judicial system; how, by means of incorporation, integration and domination of the medical knowledge on the legal rationality a normative space is generated, which, through permanently produced criminals forms of subjectivity, systematically and irreversibitically is completed with pathological recidivists. Within this boundary powerful order, inside this juridical-medical cognitive sphere, an indiscernible homogeneity between the crime (target of intervention of the penal power) and illness (target of intervention of the medical power) is interweaved. The topic of this sociological research is the social functions of the psychiatric expertise into the criminal law as political technology for constructing and consolidating of a hybrid totality of correlative interconnections between “criminal behaviour” and “pathological existence”.

The article presents the results of a study of media images of people with mental disorders in Bulgaria. Quantitative content analysis of 592 publications in tree media websites – “24 chasa”, “Dnes” and “Dnevnik”, for four-month period (September – December 2019), was conducted. The dominant approach to thematic presentation is through an individual framework; people with mental disorders are presented as aggressive and dangerous. Mental illness is used to signify the severe acts of violence described in the publications. Health information articles are poorly represented in the sample. Here, the representation of institutions does not support future reform, and the health-related information is incomplete and often misleading. One of the contributions of the study is the analysis of sporadic references; there are two types of sporadic uses – metaphorical and literal. In the metaphors, there is a distinction between the world of „madness” and that of the „normal man,” and this is precisely the technique for alienating difference. „Madness” is understood as irrationality and in this sense is associated with both negative and positive meanings. At the same time, articles with sporadic references that use the word with the root „psych-” build mental health as the norm, and hence focus on various micro-deviations (at risk of potentially pathologizing micro-differences in behavior and perceptions).

This article aims to examine the impact of the epidemic on the mental health of the citizens of Bulgaria in terms of communicational aspects in crisis management, crisis response and the possible long-term psychological consequences. The authors formulate three hypotheses, namely whether the epidemic has increased the levels of anxiety amongst the population, whether there are increased levels of aggression and self- aggression and how the informational environment has affected these processes. Several prerequisites explaining the reaction that the pandemic caused are outlined. An attempt has been made to measure elevated levels of general anxiety, which includes both normal psychological reactions to troubling events and pathological, currently hidden forms of anxiety. In the created proxy model, the increased general anxiety was compared with an analysis of the informational and media environment covering the topic of COVID-19. Correlations were sought in order to interpret the collected data on the subject.

The article presents an analysis of interviews with people with mental disorders that were conducted under the project „Mental Health and Social Inequalities”. The main approach biographical, looking for significant differences in the time of onset of the mental disorder in the life of the individual (age, marital status, etc.) and the perception of the diagnosis. We interpret the overall acceptance of the diagnosis as a dominant characteristic of identity as an imposition of a stigma on oneself. Respondents who have schizophrenia and early onset, but also those who have several people in the family with similar diagnoses, suffer the most from this self-stigmatizing perspective. In people with the so-called common mental disorders, another model is observed: a search for a diagnosis and its successful formulation lead to a feeling of complete identification with it. Acceptance, however, has another function here – embracing therapeutic optimism. The disorder is not seen as a stigma in this case, but as one of many personality traits.

The analysis unfolds two main aspects. On the one hand, it is assumed that dementia is not only a medical problem but also (in specific aspects) a social problem – in terms of social conditions and environment, biographic situations that influence its development. To illustrate this thesis six cases of living with dementia are shortly described and by “case” here is meant not only the person with dementia but also his/hers social environment/situation in which he/she is living. Interviewing a significant other is the main key to this situation. On the other hand, the article shows how phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches in interpretation/reconstruction and validation methods are practically helping the person who is taking care in a direct way and the one with dementia indirectly. The transformation of the caregiver in a phenomenologist and a psychoanalyst gives him/her the opportunity to understand him/herself and the one he/she cares for in a new way.

The article presents a few theses on anxiety, anxiety disorder and neurosis. The main concept that connects the supported positions is that anxiety differs from anxiety disorder. The experience of the anxious person is understood as an openness to a primal horror; hence, the neurotization, the anxiety disorder is an effect of the efforts to gain distance and protect the psyche from this experience (which transforms it into fear and makes it endurable). Thus, the neurotic subject is described as a producer of objects of fear. Regarding the social aspects of suffering of anxiety disorder, the article suggests that the neurotic person has access to no specific language that could effectively convey his/her experience as the vocabulary of anxiety is widely used to describe daily forms of worry and insecurity.

The problem of suicide in non-terminally ill elderly people is extremely complex both morally and as a social policy and legal regulation. In this article we demonstrate how strong currently is the temptation of experts of different types, but most often those coming from the psychiatric field, to accept by default that a state in which a person defines suicide as his/her best interest invariably pertains to the zone of mental illness. However, a resistance, both professional and activist, intensifies. Against the background of this contemporary situation, the history of socialist psychiatry in Bulgaria reveals the curious fact that the ideological contradiction faced by the local experts actually left room for individual autonomy. It is the autonomy of a lonely, abandoned and suffering elderly from late socialism, but still recognized by experts as autonomy and not as illness. Current statistics (2009-2018) suggest that today the contours of the same deeply suffering figure are clearly visible. Unfortunately the expert and public discussion on the ways we die in Bulgaria lies still ahead.