ANALYZING THE EUROCENTRIC FRAMEWORK OF PSYCHIATRISTS’ NARRATIONS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN TURKEY

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2022-8-5

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Akgüloğlu, Gönül Ezgi

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Modernization theory is one of the most dominant frameworks through which social phenomena are understood within daily language and mainstream political commentary. This study critically analyzes frameworks and discourses that silently organize the social commentaries in psychiatric studies in Turkey. The history of psychiatry in Turkey is intimately connected to how modernization has been made sense of as with Raşit Tahsin’s and Mazhar Osman’s efforts to make it a tool of state propaganda in the late 19th and early 20th century. While modernization theory is rarely cited explicitly, studies analyzed in this thesis consistently frame their narrations of social problems in Turkey around the assumptions and value attributions of modernization theory. Through a content analysis, this study discusses three different ways that modernity is implicitly staged in the studies: orientalism, occidentalism, and multiple modernities. I argue that even when Eurocentrism in the core assumptions, theories, and practices of mainstream psychiatry is challenged, the analyzed studies reiterate Orientalist discourses in all three of the ways they stage modernity. As a sharp distinction between the West and the non-West establishes the beginning and endpoint of their narrations of each imagined entity, studies further Orientalize the non-West and Occidentalize the West despite important qualifications made to moralized qualities attached to either entity. As the psychiatric studies critical of Eurocentric narrations of Turkey as a ‘backward’ nation criticize the contents of such narrations of the non-West and not the theoretical grounds that consistently reproduce these accounts, I argue that they re-iterate the very narrations that they criticize.

Subject Keywords

psychiatry, social commentaries, content analysis, Orientalism, Occidentalism, multiple modernities

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/98535

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

G. E. Akgüloğlu, “ANALYZING THE EUROCENTRIC FRAMEWORK OF PSYCHIATRISTS’ NARRATIONS OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN TURKEY,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.