Conversations in Critical Psychiatry

January 08, 2021

How can the best insights of mainstream and critical psychiatry be brought together?

December 04, 2020

How can psychotherapy become a mature science?

November 13, 2020

In this interview with Dr Aftab, Dr Dawson discusses how the rise of managed care industry and associated business forces have led to a profound deterioration of psychiatric practice environment in the United States.

October 23, 2020

In this interview with Dr Aftab, Dr de Haan discusses her enactive approach to psychiatry which applies insights from enactivism to help conceptualize and navigate the immense complexity of factors that contribute to psychiatric disorders, and articulates the enactive view of psychiatric disorders as disorders of sense-making.

October 23, 2020

In this interview with Dr Aftab, Dr Nielsen discusses his approach to psychiatry which sees mental disorders as dysfunctions in the behavioral and experiential processes representing “sticky tendencies” in the human brain-body-environment system.

October 08, 2020

Having experienced psychosis herself, a psychologist wants us to rethink how we understand and treat this complex condition.

September 17, 2020

"It is simply wishful thinking to believe that one course of treatment may entail the solution to problems that we encounter in complex cases," says Dr Fava. Dr Aftab explores a multitude of issues in psychiatry and science in this interview.

September 05, 2020

In this interview with Dr Aftab, Dr Huda discusses his views on the medical model in psychiatry, the misconceptions surrounding it, its strengths and limitations, and its relationship with other frameworks.

August 14, 2020

In this interview, Dr Aftab and Dr Johnstone discuss her criticisms of psychiatric diagnosis and her approach to psychological formulation as a conceptual alternative to diagnosis.

July 29, 2020

In this interview, Dr Aftab and Dr Shedler discuss the relationship between the psychoanalytic worldview and the medical model, and they reexamine the role of psychodynamic psychotherapy in contemporary psychiatry and psychology.

July 20, 2020

An interview with Dr Anne Harrington, who offers a stimulating and thought-provoking historical perspective on the evolution of biological psychiatry from the German histopathologists to the present time in her recent book.

June 24, 2020

In this interview, Dr Aftab and Dr Pies revisit several debates concerning various criticisms of psychiatry that Dr Pies has been involved in over the course of his career, and they discuss how to make sense of the profession’s relationship with its critics. 

May 26, 2020

Awais Aftab, MD, interviews this highly respected psychiatrist and genetics researcher, who has been further catapulted into fame over the past two decades through his widely read philosophical commentaries.

May 04, 2020

In this interview with Awais Aftab, MD, Dr Peter Zachar discusses how psychiatric disorders can be viewed through the lens of scientifically inspired pragmatism.

April 10, 2020

Dr Moncrieff’s ideas represent in many ways the enduring legacy of Thomas Szasz. In this probing interview with Dr Aftab, she challenges the medical view of mental disorders and argues that biological and behavioral conditions have a different relationship to agency.

March 31, 2020

"There is a great deal that ails psychiatry-over-diagnosis, overtreatment, misallocation of resources, consistent breaches of patients’ fundamental human rights, and so forth," says Dr McLaren in this interview.

March 30, 2020

Dr Giovanni Fava shares his perspective on the current intellectual crisis in psychiatry and how it stems from a narrow concept of science which neglects clinical practice as a source of fundamental research questions.

March 09, 2020

How have the pharmaceutical industry and academic guild interests shaped the evolution of psychiatry? Lisa Cosgrove, PhD, has something to say about it.

February 18, 2020

"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

January 27, 2020

A Conversation in Critical Psychiatry with Peter J. Whitehouse, MD, PhD.