Gücün terapi odasında sürdürülmesi: Sosyal baskınlık yönelimi, medikalizasyon ve aşırı patolojikleştirmenin kavramsal modeli

This thesis examines how therapists' orientation towards social hierarchies and their medicalization beliefs shape the risk of overpathologizing in psychotherapy. Drawing on Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), it develops a conceptual model in which SDO influences clinical judgement through medicalizations, understood as an ideological framework that legitimizes expert authority. Study 1 analyzed 1,675 naturally occurring client complaints from a public platform using large language model-based text classification. The complaints were coded for overpathologizing and grouped into the themes of overprescribing, overdiagnosis, pessimistic prognosis, and coercive treatment, providing ecological evidence that overpathologizing is a repeated problem in professional practice. Study 2 employed an online vignette experiment designed to activate SDO would increase medicalization beliefs and, in turn, overpathologizing tendencies. The manipulation produced no group differences, but medicalization beliefs were positively associated with overpathologizing, and post hoc analyses suggested an indirect pathway from SDO to overpathologizing via medicalization. Together, these findings emphasize overpathologizing as both an empirical reality and a theoretically explicable bias rooted in hierarchy-maintaining ideologies. Positioning clinical judgement within broader dynamics of power and legitimizing discourse, the thesis advances a framework for understanding how institutional authority can subtly translate into client harm, underscoring the ethical imperative for power-aware psychotherapy.