“Rethinking Psychiatry: Upstate’s Şerife Tekin Champions the Human Side of Mental Health”, by Jean Albanese, May 28, 2025:
https://www.upstate.edu/news/articles/2025/2025-05-28-tekin.php
“Humanism is so essential in medicine, especially in areas like psychiatry,” she said. “To be humanist medical practitioners, we need to understand what it means to be human. And psychiatry has a lot to learn by rethinking what it means to be a human being, using all these rich frameworks within philosophy and the sciences on the concept of the self and the benefit from it.”
Tekin said as an area of medicine, psychiatry often focuses on biological or genetic factors, which she said is necessary but not the whole picture.
“What I am saying in the book is that people are products of their social, family and cultural environments,” she said. “We do have biological determinants of health, but we also have family relationships, parents, socioeconomic difficulties, race, gender, ethnicity and all of these factors shape our experiences. People say the self is subjective and can never really be objective, but what I am saying is there is a way in which to integrate the subjective into a scientific framework.”