Bojan Bilić: Psihiatrija in družba: Depatriarhalizacija jugoslovanske psihiatrije

Zgodovina na Špici / History on the Edge

You are kindly invited to the new event of the History on the Edge series, which will take place on Wednesday, 14 May 2025 at 13:00, at the INZ premises or at the ZOOM link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86949706378

The lecture will be given by Bojan Bilić, and the title of the lecture is “Psychiatry and Society: Depatriarchalising Yugoslav Psychiatry”. The lecture will be held in English.

ZNS_predavanja_14_5 Psychiatry and Society: Depatriarchalising Yugoslav Psychiatry

Abstract

The question as to why “our self-management psychiatry” does not fare appreciably better – that is to say, is not much more humane – than the one practiced in the capitalist world, figured prominently at the conference Psychiatry and Society which Lepa Mlađenović, a feminist and increasingly visible lesbian activist, organised at the Belgrade Student Cultural Centre in 1983. This gathering – titled after the feminist activist initiative Woman and Society – unveiled strong tensions within the field of mental health care in socialist Yugoslavia and was a marking moment in the history of Yugoslav psychiatry. It was the first time that the political, social, and legal implications of patriarchal psychiatric power were publicly discussed and approached also from the perspective of psychiatric patients. This event finished with a statement by a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals who agreed upon the necessity to radically transform the Yugoslav psychiatric system. The conference, which I begin to reconstruct in my talk, constituted an impulse for a more critical approach to psychiatric practice that would take into consideration socialism’s (alleged) allegiance to equality, justice, and human dignity. However, as was the case with other emancipatory accomplishments of the socialist era, the potential of the democratic psychiatry movement, which was already fragile throughout the 1980s, would in the following decade be truncated by the destructive force of Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

Bio

Bojan Bilić is a political sociologist doing research on a range of grassroots responses to nationalism, patriarchy, and authoritarianism in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav space. So far, he has written about the history and politics of Yugoslav feminism, anti-war activism, LGBTQ engagement, the anthropology of non-heterosexuality and gender variance, LGBTQ-affirmative psychotherapy, and the initiatives for democratising psychiatry. He was a Lise Meitner Fellow at the Research Unit Gender Studies, University of Vienna, an adjunct professor of Gender and Social Movements in South East Europe at the School of Political Sciences, University of Bologna, and a visiting lecturer at the University of Sarajevo and the University of Graz.