site.btaContinue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria Call for Improving Conditions in State Psychiatric Hospitals

In a declaration read out in the plenary hall of Parliament Thursday, Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) called for action to improve conditions in state-run psychiatric hospitals. "After the two unprecedented public reports of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, after the repeated recommendations of the national ombudsman in the last ten years, a sixth patient in the last five years burned in a fire in a state psychiatric hospital," MP Stella Nikolova said as she read the declaration.

The latest case was of a 57-year-old patient who died in a fire in a Varna hospital while he was restrained and alone in a hospital room. He died of his burns. 

In 2019, three patients died in a fire in a mental clinic in Plovdiv and it remains unclear how far the investigation has reached, said Nikolova. "In May 2023, a patient died in a fire in the mental hospital in Tserova Koria and another one died in a fire in the Lovech hospital while he was died and locked up," she said. She said those deaths could have been prevented had there been permanent monitoring of the patients, as is required by a Health Ministry ordinance.

Nikolova went on to list some of the problems in state mental hospitals: inadequate funding for food and medicines, poor conditions, understaffing.  She said that the previous Parliament adopted on principle only revisions to the mental health care legislation. "If we had done our job then, these people might have been living," she said.

She also said, "Neither the patients nor the medical specialists deserve the poor conditions, underfunding and inhuman attitude of the State. It is time to act and not seek excuses in the lack of consensus."

The declaration promoted a reaction by Vazrazhdane. Georgi Georgiev MP said that the revisions in the legislation Nikolova referred to will not solve the problems but only aim to "get NGOs into mental health institutions". He also said that CC-DB "had a finance minister and he could have secured funding for the psychiatric hospitals but he only secured BGn 1 million for food". "At the same time huge funding goes for aid to Ukraine, for purchase of equipment from the US, and this is what I call impudence and arrogance," said Georgiev.