Your brain on stimulants vs your brain on ADHD There is more to what ADHD is than what stimulants do, and there is more to the clinical use of stimulants than the boundaries of ADHD www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/adhd-beyon...

Worth the read, and jargon explained. Nice!

I feel like sharing this post again… Antirealism Will Not Save the DSM From Empirical Inadequacy What does the DSM say about the unobservable structure of psychopathology? www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/antirealis...

"Can a Psychiatric Crisis Save Your Life?" Texto interessante e bem equilibrado do @awaisaftab.bsky.social www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/can-a-psyc...

Reconsidering Lithium as the Gold Standard for Bipolar Disorder: A Personal History “Lithium is one of our tools but has no special status.” A guest post by Robert Haim Belmaker www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/reconsider...

The latest in nominative determinism 😃

Can a Psychiatric Crisis Save Your Life? Madness as breakdown and breakthrough www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/can-a-psyc...

Madness gifted me the most precious things, things from the forbidden realm beyond the veil where we aren't meant to go & can't stay for long while maintaining function in this world. Most mad people will say that though it's suffering it has imparted us with things we're grateful for.

A great weekend read. As with previous interviews with the likes of Wouter Kusters, it's useful to ask whether MH episodes, in a counter-intuitive way, can serve a purpose for some people.

Only partially read so far but PSYCHED to see my absolute fave talking about the unspoken positives of “bad mental health” bc I’ve wanted to put this into words/explore this for years

Can a Psychiatric Crisis Save Your Life? Madness as breakdown and breakthrough www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/can-a-psyc...

Claudenfreude: the feeling you get when someone gets busted for using AI when they shouldn’t h/t @ssweatt.bsky.social for coining it

Just learned I've won the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contributions to Psychology in the area of psychopathology, and am feeling pretty delighted!! So grateful to @aidangcw.bsky.social for nominating me, and very proud of the work it's based on.

My periodic round-up of interesting stuff I’ve read (And some personal media favorites from 2025) www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/notable-li...

I když Freud položil základy psychoanalýzy a dodnes je v psychoanalytických kruzích velmi důležitou figurou, současná psychoanalýza není pouze o něm. Akademická psychologie to bohužel nebere moc v potaz. @awaisaftab.bsky.social toto téma rozebírá v přiloženém textu.

It just occurred to me that this juxtaposition is almost an illustration of what Dan Oppenheimer had identified as the dynamic between the Scientist and the Survivor is his profile of me, except in this case both the Scientist and the Survivor were able to grow beyond the limitations of their roles.

The All of Thine That Cannot Die: Farewell to Two Friends In memory of Dan J. Stein and Lisa Wallace www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-all-of...

Stories like this this make me realise how difficult public health progress can be. Inertia is a powerful force! Each story stresses a different mechanism for inertia Here, health progress was curiously lost due to technical progress. /1

How the Citrus Cure for Scurvy Was Lost, and Lessons for the Science of Psychopathology The copper-lined containers and the contexts that neutralize treatment www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/how-the-ci...

Cool study in JAMA Psychiatry confirms what many have suspected for a while: PHQ (depression questionnaire) instructions are widely misinterpreted by patients. It is unfortunate that a questionnaire as shitty as PHQ-9 has become so ingrained & ubiquitous jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Why I'm Trying Psych Meds Again and how I've changed my mind about their critics An excellent post by Jesse Meadows www.sluggish.xyz/p/why-im-try...

Well. The only hope remains for research programs that try to find the cause of psychotic disorders. If not us, then, maybe younger folks will have the chance to be free of this.

Antipsychotic tapering appears to help long-term in a new trial but not for the obvious reason… And considerable uncertainty remains My discussion of the HAMLETT study by Sommer et al. (October 2025, JAMA Psychiatry) www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/antipsycho...

A review of “Conversations in Critical Psychiatry” by Daniel Cohrs for the AJP Residents’ Journal. “The field’s conceptual terrain is rich, multifaceted, and contentious; the dialogue format allows for its exploration in a way that is both thoughtful & precise” psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10....

If you’re convinced the cure is worse than the disease, it’s awfully tempting to also convince yourself that there was never an illness in the first place. Nowhere is this impulse more evident than in debates about psychopathology.

Mixed Bag #25: Kinnon MacKinnon on Trans Identity and Medicine MacKinnon explores the topic using a book, a concept, a person, an article, and a surprise item www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/mixed-bag-...

Mixed Bag #25: Kinnon MacKinnon on Trans Identity and Medicine MacKinnon explores the topic using a book, a concept, a person, an article, and a surprise item www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/mixed-bag-...

What Other Diagnoses Could Learn From Autism’s Diagnostic Appeal The role of cognitive-perceptual mechanistic explanations A response by Riva Stoudt to my autism differential diagnosis post www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/what-other...

www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-202... an amazing colleague, too young

Blog post: Within family prediction of psychopathology: Bad prediction is bad prediction. ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/within-fam...

Dan J. Stein passed away on Dec 6, 2025, after a reportedly short illness. An unexpected death, we had emailed just 2 weeks ago! He was brilliant and wise, a distinguished psychiatrist, a true intellectual, a good friend. He was really gracious to me, I owe him a lot. Rest in peace. I will miss you.

I think @awaisaftab.bsky.social suggestions are worth giving serious consideration.

@awaisaftab.bsky.social your articles always lead to the most interesting discussions! Thank you so much for sharing

impaired social cognition is a huge bucket of different things. i am not a clinician but it might be less about the extent and more about the *how*.

"the choice is not between autism or nothing, but rather between autism and about a dozen other diagnostic possibilities". This is very relevant for discussions of overdiagnosis and self-diagnosis. #autism

Uma introdução interessante e bem equilibrada à confusão diagnóstica relacionada ao autismo.

The most recent article I saw was "Social cognition deficits in borderline personality disorder: Clinical relevance" by Galvez-Merlin et al. (doi.org/10.1016/j.ps...). There's also some older work by Roepke et al. (DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2012.00195) and Preißler et al. (doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00182)

Autism’s Confusing Cousins A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/autisms-co...

Reposting for the Monday crowd

Are biology-based explanations enough? 🎧 In our latest ECNP podcast, @awaisaftab.bsky.social & Stefan Jerotic explore pluralism, patient perspectives & conceptual clarity in psychiatry. Listen on your preferred platform Spotify: ow.ly/IZ7j50XzXOP Apple: ow.ly/93pg50XzXOO YouTube: ow.ly/sBiX50XzXOR

Meaning, Medications, and Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology: Discussion with David Mintz Exploring medication effects mediated symbolically www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/meaning-me...

love his book! thanks so much for this interview, it was a wonderful back and forth that resonates with so many parts of my training

Meaning, Medications, and Psychodynamic Psychopharmacology: Discussion with David Mintz Exploring medication effects mediated symbolically www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/meaning-me...

circling p-values right below .05 to infer something about the invalidity of inferences (or even research misconduct) is conceptually no different from calling p-values right above the threshold marginally significant. makes no sense to deride one of these practices while upholding the other.

The Clinical Craft of Psychiatric Medication Tapering: Q&A with Anders Sørensen “Withdrawal teaches you, as the clinician, that you don’t control the process. Successful tapering is inherently patient-led, and there’s a kind of humility in accepting that.” www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-clinic...

“RCTs or STFU” is its own form of fundamentalist dogma in medicine that is ultimately incoherent and self-serving.

6 Suggestions for DSM-6 Making the next DSM look less like a house of mirrors www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/6-suggesti...

"what we need from DSM-6 is transparency about what evidence, if any, supports the particular thresholds for the conditions included in the manual, and why that particular threshold is what it is" 👏🏻