The Future of AI in Medicine: From Rules to Intuition | Awais Aftab, Psychiatrist and writer

OCD treatment changed my life—but it took me a decade of chasing down wrong answers to be diagnosed.

In the rush to create scalable treatments, disorders like depression and OCD are squeezed into diagnostic checklists—from which the complexity of the human mind invariably leaks out. The field of psychiatry is broken, and I spoke to someone on the inside about how AI can help fix it .

Awais Aftab has been questioning psychiatry’s rigid categories from inside the field. He’s a clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University, editor of Conversations in Critical Psychiatry—an Oxford University Press volume that tackles philosophical and critical perspectives in psychiatry—and author of the Substack newsletter Psychiatry at the Margins. We get into how AI is transforming psychiatry by embracing the complexity of human minds instead of flattening it.

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Timestamps:

1. Introduction: 00:01:20

2. The case Awais makes for pluralistic thinking in psychiatry: 00:03:38

3. A pragmatic approach to mental healthcare: 00:15:30

4. Awais’s take on why my OCD diagnosis took 10 years: 00:19:04

5. Why psychiatry is stuck where machine learning was decades ago: 00:24:19

6. Why psychiatry’s focus should shift from explanations to predictions: 00:31:05

7. How Awais thinks AI is already changing the psychiatric profession: 00:39:19
   

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Awais Aftab: @awaisaftab, awais aftab

• Awais’s Substack: Psychiatry at the Margins

• The book Awais edited: Conversations in Critical Psychiatry