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).

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.

Mixed Bag

• A series in which experts explore a topic using a book, a concept, a person, an article, and a surprise item.

Psychiatric Diagnosis & Explanation

• Diagnosis as Self-Understanding & Self-Alienation

• Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Reintroduction

• Hermeneutic Labor in Medicine and Psychiatry

• The Politics of Psychiatric Classification

Psychopharmacology

• The Case for Antidepressants in 2022

• Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction & Medical Decision Making Under Uncertainty

• Clarifying the links between depression, serotonin, and SSRIs

Psychiatry and Lived Experience

• Guest Post: A Psychiatric Survivor Comes to a Place of Understanding

Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Divide

• When are we justified in calling mental disorders “brain disorders”?

• Brain Disorders in Entangled Brains

• RDoC more than a decade later: humbler and wiser?

• Mark Solms and Sanneke de Haan on the Mind-Body Problem

Psychiatric Culture Wars

• Psychiatric Psychodrama

I post links to a curated selection of online articles and stories about once a month. These posts are for paid subscribers with a preview available for free subscribers. I also occasionally share quotes/passages from books/articles that I find interesting and thought-provoking. For such posts, my goal is to focus on material that the average reader of this newsletter is unlikely to have come across on their own, but would find relevant. These are often, but not always, for paid subscribers as well. Examples:

• Mysterium tremendum fascinans

• Messy, Bloody, and of the Past

For general posts, comments are 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.

Stay tuned!

Twitter: @awaisaftab ; Mastodon: @awaisaftab

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

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

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