Awais Aftab, MD

Awais Aftab, MD

Dr Aftab is a psychiatrist in Cleveland, Ohio, and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. He writes online on his blog Psychiatry at the Margins.

Articles by Awais Aftab, MD

Susannah Cahalan

"The idea of seeing a patient, not just a diagnostic label, is an extremely valuable lesson. Being primed to see certain behaviors as pathological in certain contexts and perfectly normal in others is something that all doctors should be aware of." -Susannah Cahalan

S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH

"Psychiatry has been frozen in time since the 80s, and hence the absence of progress since then is no surprise." So says, S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, in the next installment of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry with Awais Aftab, MD.

"Go out into the real world; work in prisons, in run-down towns with high unemployment or with refugees or in remote areas. Go overseas or into underprivileged parts of your own country. And that is how you learn about real psychiatry," says Niall McLaren, MBBS, FRANZCP, in the next installment of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry.

Thomas Szasz-a psychiatrist-was a lifelong ferocious critic of the institution of psychiatry. A significant body of discourse on the notion of mental disorder by psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists alike has been centered on understanding and responding to his critique.