Milestone/Open Thread
Celebrating 2-year anniversary and 10K subscribers
I started Psychiatry at the Margins in Nov 2022. It is now two years old and has reached ten thousand total subscribers!
My gratitude to all the readers across the world (120+ countries) who subscribe to this Substack, and an extra thanks to those who support this newsletter with a paid subscription. Working on this publication has been extremely rewarding for me, and this would not be possible without your interest and engagement.
This post is an open thread with an invitation to ask me anything. All readers are welcome to comment: share feedback, introduce yourselves, point out theoretical or scientific developments that I should be paying attention to, suggest topics for future posts, etc.
In my first, introductory post on the blog, I noted:
“I have realized that the mainstream discussions in the field as well as in the general public are often conceptually muddled and scientifically impoverished, and there is a need for commentators who can make our best conceptual and scientific understandings of “mental illness” and “psychopathology” — and the controversies and uncertainties that surround these explanations — accessible to a wider audience. That is a role I hope to play using this blog/newsletter… I am hoping to use this newsletter to open a space to synthesize my thoughts and cultivate an audience in a manner not currently facilitated by academic journals or platforms such as twitter.”
And
“I see myself as engaged in a two-fold mission:
i) To promote a philosophically-informed and scientific practice of psychiatry that robustly engages with the metaphysical, relational, and phenomenological dimensions of psychopathology
ii) To contextualize psychiatry within a broader pluralistic domain of mental healthcare and psy-disciplines…”
I think I have stayed true to this mission over these past two years.
Tomorrow I will share additional thoughts along with invited comments from a few friends to reflect on the role this newsletter plays and can play in the contemporary information landscape.
If this newsletter enriches your intellectual life and you’d like to help sustain it, I hope you will consider supporting the publication through a paid subscription. Currently, less than 2% of readers are paid subscribers.
The following are the 5 most popular posts on Psychiatry at the Margins per Substack
And the following is a personal selection of five relatively underappreciated posts for you to revisit or discover:
You can explore the full archive here.
If you enjoy Psychiatry at the Margins, you should also look into my book, Conversations in Critical Psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Thanks again for your continued readership and engagement.
Maybe I’ve missed something (I haven’t read all your posts) but it seems like you never write about (structural) dissociation. That is, dissociative amnesia, dissociative identity disorder, OSDD. Without a knowledge of dissociation, our understanding of psychology is impoverished, even deluded. Do you, like so many others, not believe in it? Or do you, like so many others, think it is rare? It isn’t rare. It is more common than schizophrenia or bipolar. Could you write a post on structural dissociation? If you don’t believe in it or believe it’s too rare to bother with, could you give your reasoning?
Congratulations on the two year anniversary. Your reflections have helped me to think deeply about a range of issues.
I would love to read your thoughts on navigating the gap between ‘best practice’ and ‘good enough’ care in mental health. I find this is both a clinical and philosophical challenge, and one that my training (psychologist) has not equipped me well for.
I am eager for discussions on how to I improve my treatment decision making skills to assist the person in distress who is sitting in front of me right, as opposed to hypothetical client being treated in abundant and limitless settings. To know how to select from the tools I have at hand and avoid get sucked into circular discussions of ‘if only we had xyz!’.
Many thanks,
Emily