Awais Aftab, a clinical assistant professor and editor at Conversations in Critical Psychiatry, shares his insights on the challenges within contemporary psychiatry. He discusses the complexities of diagnosing OCD, revealing how rigid categories often fall short. Awais highlights scientific pluralism, advocating for diverse theoretical perspectives in understanding mental health. Delving into AI's potential, he explores how it can enhance diagnosis and treatment, promising a more nuanced approach to human psychology.
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Dan's OCD Diagnosis Journey
Dan Shipper shares that his OCD diagnosis took 10 years and multiple therapists before self-identifying it.
Awais Aftab confirms OCD is often missed and has fuzzy symptom boundaries, making diagnosis challenging.
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Explanatory Pluralism in Psychiatry
Explanatory pluralism accepts multiple scientific perspectives to understand complex phenomena.
Psychiatry requires pluralism as mental disorders don't have a single essence like chemical elements.
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Context-Dependence of Scientific Theories
Scientific theories are context-dependent and different frameworks may suit different goals.
Although some theories like the periodic table have wide utility, alternative classifications might offer advantages in special contexts.
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Conversations in Critical Psychiatry brings together interviews with leading figures in psychiatry to discuss topics such as the classification of mental disorders, the use of medication, and the relationship between mind and brain. The book offers a pluralistic view of psychiatric practice, emphasizing the need for diverse perspectives in understanding mental health issues.
OCD treatment changed my life—but it took me a decade of chasing down wrong answers to be diagnosed.
In the rush to create scalable treatments, disorders like depression and OCD are squeezed into diagnostic checklists—from which the complexity of the human mind invariably leaks out. The field of psychiatry is broken, and I spoke to someone on the inside about how AI can help fix it .
Awais Aftab has been questioning psychiatry’s rigid categories from inside the field. He’s a clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, editor of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry—an Oxford University Press volume that tackles philosophical and critical perspectives in psychiatry—and author of the Substack newsletter Psychiatry at the Margins. We get into how AI is transforming psychiatry by embracing the complexity of human minds instead of flattening it.
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Timestamps:
Introduction: 00:01:20
The case Awais makes for pluralistic thinking in psychiatry: 00:03:38
A pragmatic approach to mental healthcare: 00:15:30
Awais’s take on why my OCD diagnosis took 10 years: 00:19:04
Why psychiatry is stuck where machine learning was decades ago: 00:24:19
Why psychiatry’s focus should shift from explanations to predictions: 00:31:05
How Awais thinks AI is already changing the psychiatric profession: 00:39:19
AI and I 
