THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY ANKARA UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF WESTERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE PSYCHIATRIC POWER IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH DRAMA: TOM STOPPARD’S EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR, SARAH DANIELS’S HEAD-ROT HOLIDAY AND JOE PENHALL’S BLUE/ORANGE M.A. Thesis Nur ÇÜRÜK ANKARA-2019 THE REPUBLIC OF TURKEY ANKARA UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF WESTERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE PSYCHIATRIC POWER IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH DRAMA: TOM STOPPARD’S EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR, SARAH DANIELS’S HEAD-ROT HOLIDAY AND JOE PENHALL’S BLUE/ORANGE M.A. Thesis Nur ÇÜRÜK Supervisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sıla ŞENLEN GÜVENÇ Ankara-2019 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Sıla ŞENLEN GÜVENÇ for her invaluable guidance, support, and patience during the thesis process. She has provided me with the right balance of independence and guidance, offering me both academic guidance precisely when needed and the freedom to wander intellectually and find my own path. I am grateful for her trust, endless patience, and enormous support. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciation to the valuable members of the committee: Prof. Nazan TUTAŞ and Assist. Prof. Mustafa KIRCA for their suggestions and constructive criticism. I wish to express my special thanks to Muharrem DEMİRDİŞ, a great companion who inspired, encouraged, and helped me get through the most stressful moments of this period in the most positive way. I would also like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my friends, Ezgi Deniz FESLİOĞLU and Pınar OLGUN for the warm encouragement and support they extended. Above all, I would like to express my indebtedness to my family, my parents Meryem and Yusuf ÇÜRÜK and my sister Çiğdem TIKIROĞLU for their faith in me, and encouragement to pursue my dreams. I am grateful for their unconditional love and support throughout my life. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………...………………………………………1 CHAPTER I: Psychiatry as Social Control and Anti-Psychiatry: Theories and Perspectives……………………………………………………………………………..6 1.1. Psychiatry as Social Control: A Brief History…………………………………..…6 1.2. Anti-Psychiatry Perspectives of Mental Illness and Psychiatry………………...…39 1.3. Psychiatric Power………………………………………………………………….44 CHAPTER II: Psychiatric Power and Contemporary British Drama………....….70 CHAPTER III: Psychiatric Power and Suppression of Political Dissidence: Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977)……………………………......85 CHAPTER IV: Psychiatric Power and ‘Mad’ Women: Sarah Daniels’s Head-rot Holiday (1992)..............................................................................................................114 CHAPTER V: Psychiatric Power and Race/Ethnicity: Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000)……………………………………………………………….…………………136 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….…...165 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………....178 ABSTRACT…………………………………….……………………………………187 ÖZET………………………………………………………………………...…….....190 i INTRODUCTION Psychiatry is a medical specialty concerned with the diagnosis, treatment, and research of mental, emotional, and behavioural disorders. This field has become an object of considerable criticism and debate throughout its history in terms of its nature, aims, and methods. A great deal of this controversy has centred on non-objectivity of psychiatric diagnosis, involuntary hospitalization of individuals, unlimited power of psychiatrists over patients within institutional areas, excessive use of medication, and implementation of particular treatment modalities such as electro-shock therapy, lobotomy, and insulin coma-therapy that may cause more harm than good. The criticisms revolving around these issues and mainly arguing for a more ‘humane’ psychiatry with ethical and human rights concerns were carried forward in a more radical way in the second half of the 20th century. This was realized through the political and philosophical questionings of the Anti-psychiatry Movement which arose in the socio-political climate of the 1960s. The term “anti-psychiatry” was coined by South-African born British psychiatrist David Cooper in his study Psychiatry and Anti-psychiatry (1967) to refer to a set of radical ideas expressed by thinkers such as Michel Foucault in France, Thomas Szasz in the United States, Franco Basaglia in Italy, Erving Goffman in Canada, and Ronald David Laing in Britain. These thinkers, in contrast to previous critics, did not simply demand more ‘humane’ conditions in psychiatry; they instead problematized the very foundations of psychiatry itself: its raison d’être, its foundational concept of mental illness, and its role within society in terms of the social control of deviant behaviour. In substance, anti-psychiatrists questioned the existence and reality of mental illness as a medical entity and approached it as a socio-political phenomenon. They attacked the validity and reliability of psychiatric diagnoses, arguing that unlike the criteria for diagnosing a physical disease, the criteria for identifying a mental or 1 psychological disorder cannot be objective since they are closely connected with the cultural, political, or economic conditions and expectations of a particular society and of a particular time. In this argument, they frequently referred to psychiatry’s former disease model of homosexuality which had been considered as a mental disorder until 1973 when it was finally removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) with the impact of the changing social norms and the developing LGBT movements. In this context, these critics approached psychiatry as an institution of social control that provides a legitimate basis for labelling the individuals whose deviant behaviour and ideas pose a danger to the existing social conformity as ‘mentally ill’, and for regulating those perceived deviances in accordance with the common values and norms of society. Anti-psychiatrists generally rejected this ‘normative’ operation of psychiatry over certain members of society. In the light of anti-psychiatry criticisms, this thesis focuses on how psychiatry and its institutions can be central to the process whereby certain individuals of society fall into the ‘abnormal’ category and in turn become the objects of the correctional and normalizing practises of disciplinary power. For this analysis, contemporary British drama provides a convenient basis through its considerable amount of plays dealing with madness as a socio-political issue. Such plays usually portray mentally ill characters as individuals who either deviate from the established behavioural and intellectual norms of society, or are unluckily ‘maddened’ as a consequence of their exposure to experiences such as social discrimination, oppression, and abuse due to their perceived abnormalities. In the plays, most of these mad characters are compulsorily placed in mental institutions and subjected to disciplinary practices usually targeting their socially undesirable behaviour and attitudes. These common aspects make these contemporary British plays a significant source for the re- interrogation of the disciplinary nature and operations of psychiatry. 2 In this respect, this thesis aims to study the use of psychiatric procedures – diagnosis, treatment, and hospitalization – for the purposes of social control through the analysis of Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), Sarah Daniels’s Head-rot Holiday (1992), and Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange (2000). These three plays have been specifically chosen for this analysis because each play both takes place in a psychiatric institution and involves characters stigmatized as ‘mentally ill’ due to a different experience of ‘otherness’: In Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1977), the mentally ill character, Alexander Ivanov who has been imprisoned in a Soviet mental hospital is a political dissident; in Head-rot Holiday (1992), the inmates of Penwell Special Hospital are three women, Dee, Ruth, and Claudia who have either violated the hetero-normative social roles, or suffered from mental disorder as a result of their experiences of oppression and abuse; and finally in Blue/Orange (2000), the mad character, Christopher who has been compulsorily hospitalized through the criminal justice system is a young coloured man suffering from mental disorder as a destructive effect of his experiences of racial hatred and discrimination due to his ethnic minority identity. The first chapter of this thesis “Psychiatry as Social Control and Anti- Psychiatry: Theories and Perspectives” is composed of three sections. The first section “Psychiatry as Social Control: A Brief History” will provide a historical perspective on the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that led to the emergence of psychiatry and its institutions in order to provide a better understanding of the disciplinary function attached to this medical field. This historical analysis will cover the historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present, and will mainly focus on how the perception and treatment of madness in Western society have evolved over time in accordance with each period’s own social framework along with the changing cultural, political, and economic realities. The second section “Anti-Psychiatry 3 Perspectives of Mental Illness and Psychiatry” will touch briefly on anti-psychiatrists and Michel Foucault’s critical views of mental