Evidence grows that mental illness is more than dysfunction | Aeon Essays

Mental Wealth

TL;DR • When it comes to mental health, our society approaches it like we did with physical health 50 years ago. We only think about it when something goes wrong. • To the wider public, mental heal…

Psychiatry at the Margins | Awais Aftab | Substack

Exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences. Click to read Psychiatry at the Margins, by Awais Aftab, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Madness and Enterprise: Psychiatry, Economic Reason, and the Emergence of Pathological Value

Uncovers a powerful relationship between pathology and money: beginning in the nineteenth century, the severity of mental illness was measured against a patient’s economic productivity.  Madness and Enterprise reveals the economic norms embedded within psychiatric thinking about mental illness in the North Atlantic world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, various forms of madness were subjected to a style of psychiatric reasoning that was preoccupied with money. Psychiatrists across Western Europe and the United States attributed financial and even moral value to an array of pathological conditions, such that some mental disorders were seen as financial assets and others as economic liabilities. By turning to economic conduct and asking whether potential patients appeared capable of managing their financial affairs or even generating wealth, psychiatrists could often bypass diagnostic uncertainties about a person’s mental state. Through an exploration of the intertwined histories of psychiatry and economic thought, Nima Bassiri shows how this relationship transformed the very idea of value in the modern North Atlantic, as the most common forms of social valuation—moral value, medical value, and economic value—were rendered equivalent and interchangeable. If what was good and what was healthy were increasingly conflated with what was remunerative (and vice versa), then a conceptual space opened through which madness itself could be converted into an economic form and subsequently redeemed—and even revered.

Did therapy help with your executive function issues?

How Bad Are Things?

One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…

Blood tests for mental health problems | Eiko Fried

A new paper was published yesterday on a blood test for schizophrenia, by the same research team that in 2021 published a paper on a blood test for depression . The papers and...

Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.

The empathy layer

“Everyone wants to be the Uber of mental health.”

Interoception Is Our Sixth Sense, and It May Be Key to Mental Health

Disruptions in interoception may underlie anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health ailments

How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive | Aeon Essays

ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information

How the hypercuriosity of ADHD may have helped humans thrive | Aeon Essays

ADHD isn’t merely a dysfunction. It’s best understood as an impulsive motivational drive for novel information

Twin study links artistic, but not scientific, creativity to poorer mental health

The relationship between creativity and mental health has attracted the interest of many psychologists over the past decades. Some past studies have found that creativity is sometimes linked to mental ...

Who listens when mental health struggles disrupt daily life?

Ask a Bangladeshi newspaper reader to picture a mental health story. Perhaps a psychiatrist’s quote comes to mind, a helpline number, or a headline about a student’s death.

‘You don’t want to get better’: the outdated treatment of ME/CFS patients is a national scandal | George Monbiot

The notion that this illness is psychosomatic is having devastating effects, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Who Gets to Define Human Suffering?

As psychiatry concedes long-standing criticisms of diagnosis, a deeper question emerges: What now justifies its authority over human suffering?