Date of Award

January 2020

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Medical Doctor (MD)

Department

Medicine

First Advisor

Aniyizhai Annamalai

Second Advisor

Marc Potenza

Abstract

This qualitative project seeks to explore sociopolitical factors influencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnostication in Syrian migrants living in Jordan. Interviews were performed with twenty-three key informants, comprised of clinicians, organizational staff, and scholars, using semi-structured techniques which were analyzed with grounded theory analytic approaches. The results illuminate the complex social forces governing the practice of PTSD diagnostication in the Syrian migrant population in Jordan, with a focus on the effects of financial pressures. This is the first study to report extensively on the financial pressures affecting PTSD diagnostication in this setting. These data served as rooted substrate for a critical theory-informed secondary analysis through the dyad of Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago and the concept of abolition geography from black radical scholarship. The analysis suggests that the phenomenon of overdiagnostication of PTSD in Syrian migrants represents an instance of both totalitarian and colonialist instrumentalization of psychiatry.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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