Diagnosing the National Neurosis: The Underground Journal Şizofrengi and Its Critique of 1990s Turkish Society

Abstract

This paper examines the attempt by the Turkish underground journal Şizofrengi (1992–98) to provide a space for psychiatrists, artists, and mental patients to voice their personal concerns as a means to critique problems in Turkish society. Şizofrengi was founded by young psychiatrists in order to critique the problems they felt were endemic to their field. Rejecting the institutional practices and assumptions the editors found constraining in their psychiatric community, Şizofrengi sought to give the patient a space to speak for themselves in order to deconstruct the vaunted role of the psychiatrist in Turkey. But Şizofrengi also sought to appropriate the language of psychology and the “madnesses” of the patients it strives to cure in order to revitalize what the editors felt was a moribund literary culture. The journal gave a voice to marginalized, underground writers, critics, and film makers that would go on to become far better known outside the confines of the journals’ pages. While the result demonstrates that care must be taken when borrowing the discourse of the mentally ill, Şizofrengi presents an interesting case of a journal that was able to draw on issues of psychiatry in order to critique both literary and mainstream society.