Psychiatry at the Margins | Awais Aftab | Substack

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?

Computational Psychiatry Needs Systems Neuroscience

This piece was originally published in The Transmitter. I am adapting it here with some additional context for readers of this newsletter.

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.

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.

Occurrence of Psychosis and Bipolar Disorder in Individuals With ADHD Treated With Stimulants

This systematic review and meta-analysis evaluates the association between psychosis or bipolar disorder and stimulant treatment among individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Leading Innovation in Psychiatric Treatment | Alto Neuroscience

We leverage brain biology to develop personalized medicines, helping patients get better faster.

AI for Proactive Mental Health: A Longitudinal, Multi-Institutional Trial

Young adults today face unprecedented mental health challenges, yet many hesitate to seek support due to barriers such as accessibility, stigma, and time constr

Why Psychology Hasn’t Had a Big New Idea in Decades

Can our field get its act together?

Retraction Note: The complex lived experience of schizophrenia diagnosis: a thematic analysis of online forum posts

Current Psychology -

The Wretched of the Earth

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took p…