Change without Change: Remaking Mental Health Advocacy in Bulgaria

The article explores the specificities of mental health and disability advocacy and activism in Bulgaria and demonstrates the persistence of a "spokespersonship" model that emerged in late socialism and was further entrenched during the postsocialist transition. It enacts a pattern of claiming and staging "allyship" with people with psychiatric diagnoses on the part of professionals that is a rich soil for the inexorable paternalism and absence of mental health activism locally.