Psychiatry at the Margins

Psychiatry at the Margins is a newsletter about exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences. I am Awais Aftab, a psychiatrist in the US who is active in these debates as a clinician, educator, scholar, and writer (learn more about me here).

See profiles in Lancet Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Networker.

I started this newsletter in November 2022. If you are new to it, you can start with some of the posts linked below. You can also see “top posts” in the archive, as determined by the Substack algorithm.

• Diagnosis as Self-Understanding & Self-Alienation

• The Case for Antidepressants in 2022

• Treatment Resistant Depression — A Collective Failure of Imagination

• A New Reanalysis of STAR*D Data

• The “Antipsychiatry” Dilemma

• To Test Or Not To Test: Medical Work-Up of Psychosis

• Do all roads lead to mitochondria?

• Advancing Neuroscientific Understanding of Brain-Behavior Relationship: A Conversation with Nicole C. Rust

• Adventures in Personalized Psychopharmacology: A Conversation with David Mordecai

• Health Communism — All Care For All People (Part 1)

• Asking better questions about involuntary psychiatric care

• A Psychopharmacology Fit for Mad Liberation?

• Mixed Bag #1: Adam DeVille on Psychoanalysis (the entire Mixed Bag series is worth exploring!)

• 30 Years of Listening to Prozac: A Discussion with Peter Kramer

• Are Critiques of DSM/ICD as Devastating for Psychiatric Diagnosis as Some Critics Seem to Think?

Guest Posts (Examples):

• The Remaking of a Therapist

• On Burning Your Maps: A Parent-Caregiver Perspective on Mental Healthcare in the US

• Finding My Way Out of Anti-Psychiatry: A Patient Perspective

I post links to a curated selection of online articles and stories, with varying frequency. These and a selection of other posts are paid subscribers only.

For general posts, comments are usually restricted to paid subscribers. There are occasional open threads.

Although most posts are and will continue to be public, if you have a specific interest in these issues and have the means to support this newsletter, I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber.

X/Twitter: @awaisaftab ; Blueksy: @awaisaftab.bsky.social

See this post for an introduction to Psychiatry at the Margins.

To learn more about me and my work, see my personal website.