This page was translated automatically from Turkish. Read the original

This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0972

A Comparative Analysis of Shifts in Subjectivity in Depression Discourse

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF SUBJECTIVITY SHIFTS IN DEPRESSION DISCOURSE

A comparison of online depression discourse six years apart found a decline in emotional and expert-dependent narratives and an increase in functioning-oriented and self-managing narratives.

The study aims to trace how subjectivity in depression discourse evolved between two time points, specifically the shift from narratives of emotional suffering to narratives of productivity and instrumental self-management. A comparative content analysis was conducted on approximately 2,250 online comments, using Python-based natural language processing (NLP) to code each comment by narrative type (emotional or functional) and model of subjectivity (active manager or passive patient). The proportion of functional narratives among coded comments rose from 16.10% to 25.45%, with depression increasingly framed as a disruption to daily routines and work performance. The active manager model, in which diagnosis is used as a tool for self-improvement, nearly doubled from 5.93% to 10.03%. In the earlier dataset, emotional narratives (17.80%) and passive patient framing (13.98%) were more prevalent, centering on dependence on experts and inner suffering. The authors interpret the findings as a shift toward functional medicalization, in which depression is viewed less as an emotional state and more as an obstacle to social productivity. The stated limitations are that the analysis relies on publicly available online comments from two time points and that the findings are exploratory; future research should incorporate intermediate time points, multiple platforms, and qualitative validation of the coding scheme.

All WCP 2026 summaries