Implications of critical psychiatry for practice

Daniel Cohrs & Awais Aftab (2025) provide a useful overview of the heterogeneity and debate within critical psychiatry and adjacent movements. Although the article proposes a reorientation of psychiatric practice, I have criticised Awais before (see eg. previous post) for not going far enough in his critique. When commenting on another article about critical psychiatry by Samei Huda (see previous post), I tried to simplify this issue. Essentially, it is that people tend to understand from psychiatry that mental illness is due to brain disease. Psychiatry needs to be far more explicit that most mental illness is not due to brain disease. It wants to hold on too much to speculative hopes that a biological understanding of functional mental illness will be found.