I want to make a strong claim about psychiatrist and philosopher of psychiatry Awais Aftab, my guest on the podcast today. He is the single best writer out there today for anyone who is interested in intellectually understanding where the field of mental health is right now.
Among the questions to which he has illuminating and often quite profound answers: Is there a crisis of overdiagnosis? What does the anti-psychiatry movement get right and wrong? What does the discipline of psychiatry get right and wrong? Who are the most interesting thinkers in the mental health realm right now? What even is mental illness? Is it time to dispense altogether with the DSM, or does it just need reform? What do and don’t we know about the efficacy, and cultural significance, of the legal drugs so many of us, present company included, are being prescribed.
There are plenty of writers out there who are addressing these and related issues, but I can’t think of anyone who comes close to Aftab in terms of addressing the entire range of them, and doing so in an intellectual serious and aesthetically engaging way. If you want a steady fix of the good shit, in this space, he’s the guy who has it. My guess is that everyone who’s anyone in psychiatry is already reading him, and that a lot of the journalists who seriously cover mental health are reading him as well, or will be soon.
As I say to him in our conversation, I’d been waiting, consciously or not, for someone to fill the space that he has now filled, and it was super exciting to me when I encountered his work. It made my world better, and larger. It’s also just so perfectly connected to the core purpose of this podcast, which is to expose listeners to people and topics they should know if they want to be hip to what’s going on or what will be going on soon. It was great to talk to him.
Aftab is the author of the Psychiatry at the Margins Substack, the recent book from Oxford University Press Conversations in Critical Psychiatry, and a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press titled, provisionally, “Remaking Psychiatry.”
Hope you enjoy.
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