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1 week ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
In an Opinion guest essay for the New York Times (May 3, 2024) — titled variously as “Prozac Is Nearly 40 Years Old. Why Are There Still Unanswered Questions?” “Harm From Antidepressants Is Real.
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1 week ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab |Josh Richardson
Readers of Psychiatry at the Margins will remember Joshua Richardson from his reviews of the ‘Too Mad to be True’ conferences. Several years ago, Josh introduced me to Emil du Bois-Reymond and the Latin maxim “ignoramus et ignorabimus,” (“we are ignorant and we will remain ignorant”), and Josh treats us now to an interview with the historian Gabriel Finkelstein.
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1 week ago | 
nytimes.com | Awais Aftab
Like every psychiatrist, I have patients for whom antidepressants are transformative, even lifesaving. But I also see a messier, less advertised side of these medications. There are patients with sexual side effects that they hadn't known could be caused by their antidepressants because previous doctors never warned them.
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2 weeks ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
Sociopolitical dysfunction and pseudoscientific populism in the US have come for psychiatry, as they have for much of academia and medicine. Just as sepsis affects all organs of a body, no social institution can function properly in a septic society. The predicament of American medicine is multi-layered, and failures of the healthcare system have played no small part in the etiogenesis.
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3 weeks ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
People Are Stumbling From One Misguided Narrative About the Medical Model to AnotherThe story “Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?” in the New York Times Magazine by Paul Tough (April 13, 2025) has generated intense discussion over this past week.
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3 weeks ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
Traditional antidepressants that act via serotonin and other monoamines, such as SSRIs, require several weeks to show substantial symptomatic improvement, and it has been a source of frustration for clinicians and patients from the very beginning. The delayed onset led to the search for and the development of antidepressant medications, such as ketamine and brexanolone, that begin to show meaningful effects within hours and days, and that act via mechanisms that go beyond the monoamine system.
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1 month ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
This post contains excerpts from the epilogue of my book “Conversations in Critical Psychiatry” (OUP, 2024), in which I am asked questions by Richard Gipps and Nev Jones, two people I admire greatly. This Q&A took place in mid-to-late 2022 and is best read in conjunction with the introductory chapter “Psychiatry and the Critical Landscape.” Richard G. T.
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1 month ago | 
vientosur.info | Awais Aftab
[Awais Aftab entrevista a Sascha Altman DuBrul, cofundador de The Icarus Project, una red de apoyo dirigida por pares y un proyecto mediático con el objetivo de reformular el lenguaje y la cultura en torno a lo que se considera salud y enfermedad mental.
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1 month ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
Philosophical clarity is hard-won. It may seem easy in retrospect, and the insights may seem obvious, but getting to that point is often a slog. I rely on and benefit tremendously from the work of philosophers who often don’t get enough credit for their efforts.
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1 month ago | 
psychiatrymargins.com | Awais Aftab
Cooper Davis is the Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative. He has worked in the mental health non-profit space for a decade, previously building and running peer support programs for participants in the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. In prior lives, he has worked in journalism and television production.
