By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

Some psychiatrists are highly skilled manipulators and therefore dangerous for their patients, as I shall explain below. This applies to Awais Aftab from Cleveland, Ohio.

According to Robert Whitaker, Aftab has staked out a position as being open-minded to critiques of psychiatry, which is a public stance that makes him particularly valuable to his profession. He can serve as a defender of psychiatry against critiques that are truly threatening, and his criticisms will be seen as coming from someone who is open-minded about psychiatry's flaws. Whitaker demonstrated that Aftab "is seeking to protect psychiatry's narrative of progress - a narrative that arises from psychiatry's guild interests, and not a faithful record of its own research literature."

In July 2025, JAMA Psychiatry published a grossly misleading garbage in, garbage out review. The authors listed more drug company payments to themselves than references to scientific papers, which were 47. They mobilised a rapid media campaign, with the Science Media Centre, issuing expert commentary to "reassure both patients and prescribers" that most withdrawal symptoms after stopping antidepressants were "not clinically significant."

Two days after the review came out, Aftab tried to defend it on his blog and to cast doubt on a much better review that told a story of serious drug harm. He calls his blog "Psychiatry at the Margins," which it isn't, as he is a mainstream psychiatrist. He presents himself as a clinician, educator, scholar, and writer.

I consider this overblown grandiosity and would not call him a scholar. I demonstrated that his article was full of serious errors, unwarranted denigration of much better research, with no arguments why he considered the much better review "very methodologically-problematic" with "obviously highly-inflated" numbers. This is typical of Aftab. He always gives himself a free ride, whereby he avoids opening a debate. He also praised another grossly flawed review.

In an interview four months earlier, Aftab had said that "antidepressants are not addictive, because people don't get high." If true, this would be great news for smokers. As they don't get high by smoking, nicotine is not addictive, and they could easily stop smoking, right?

Aftab also noted that about half of depressed people who try one or several antidepressants ultimately respond well, which is also totally wrong and likely comes from the STAR*D trial, which is a gigantic $35 million fraud financed by the US National Institute of Mental Health. And he opined that a withdrawal trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine was "rigorous and high-quality." It surely wasn't, which Maryanne Demasi and I documented in our systematic review of withdrawal studies.

When psychiatry professor Joanna Moncrieff and colleagues recently exposed the hoax about depression being caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, Aftab called her a "contrarian." Aftab, a biological psychiatrist, involuntarily revealed that biological psychiatry is a pseudoscience with no clothes. He hid behind pompous mumbo jumbo devoid of any meaning.

Moncrieff exposed his tricks in her article, "Wishful thinking dressed up in scientific terminology: a reply to Awais Aftab." Joanna writes that "What Aftab presents as alternative ways of understanding the relationship between serotonin and depression are not even testable theories, although the sprinkling of technical jargon ('signalling,' 'dysfunctions') makes them sound impressive…Aftab is putting forward unsubstantiated speculations and suggesting these are a good enough basis to accept the idea that depression is a neurobiological condition."

Aftab's manipulations are what child and adolescent psychiatrist Sami Timimi calls scientism (beliefs masquerading as science). Practitioners of alternative medicine argue in the same way as Aftab does and sprinkle their nonsense with scientific words and phrases.

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