The Bulgarian Center for Not-for-Profit Law has been working since 2012 on the topic of abolishing the guardianship and introducing an adequate support system for persons who have difficulties to exercise their rights independently, providing sufficient guarantees for protection, respect for dignity and will.
In 2023, Dr. Venelin Stoychev, commissioned by BCNL, prepared an interdisciplinary study on public reservations towards the abolition of the institution of guardianship.
The text focuses on the current debate on the abolition of guardianship and the introduction of a model for supported decision-making. The analysis reveals the removal of legal capacity and placement under guardianship as a practice that contradicts some of the deepest values of Modernity. The article mobilizes resources from the research tradition of sociological perspectives on modernity to contribute to freeing the debate about the abolition of disqualification in our country from the "gravitational fields" of typologically significant macrostructural social tendencies whose manifest forms are often perceived in our country today as environmental, gendered, generational, or personal deviations.
The exposition takes us through the themes of the "comicality" of forensic-psychiatric expertise (M. Foucault), civility and the tendency to "follow the rules" (N. Elias), the social construction of the structure of personality (H. Marcuse, P. Burger and T. Luckmann), the threats to modern freedom embedded in the structure of modern societies (B. Constant), the realization of some of these threats (E. Fromm and H. Arendt), the socio-historical context for the replacement of "arithmetical justice" by the principle of inner conviction (M. Foucault), in order to defend the thesis that it is not the rupture (through interdiction) but the conscious construction and sustainable reproduction of social bonds that fosters the establishment of a socio-cultural context that more effectively protects the rights and interests of people with (mental) disabilities.