Top all-time · #10256
Awais Aftab
Personal blog · psychiatrymargins.comhealthphilosophyscience
Awais Aftab writes Psychiatry at the Margins, a personal blog at psychiatrymargins.com about health, philosophy and science. Since 2024, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “Autism's confusing cousins”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Awais Aftab's psychiatry blog, which covers schizophrenia, genetics and mental health research, including a cliff-edge hypothesis for schizophrenia and a follow-up paper that revisits it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences.
Most-linked posts?
- Autism's confusing cousins2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-06
- Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-28
What Hacker News says?
> Under your view, how would you explain why the disorders have different rates of heritability, different genetic markers, different fMRI patterns, and different treatments? "Heritability" is a misnomer. "Heritability" via twin studies cannot account for the prenatal phase, so by definition anything that results from early developmental influences is included in "heritability", where it would be more precise to reg…
Comment linking /p/traditional-dsm-disorders-dissolve?r=2wyot6&triedRedirect=true
on “Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score””Submitted Autism's confusing cousins as a story · 353 points
HN discussionVery worth it to read the follow up research paper that moves away from this cliff-edge hypothesis, highlights other ambiguities, and attempts some self-correction. https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/the-evolutionary-genetic... In any case, a fascinating read and well-worth it to explore the linked citations, especially by Crow and Nesse.
Comment linking /p/the-evolutionary-genetics-of-schizophrenia
on “Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff”Submitted Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff as a story · 262 points
HN discussionOn a related note the site spreads sketchy "science", eg. when it comes to genetics and mental health. https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/how-mad-in-america-misre...
Comment linking /p/how-mad-in-america-misrepresents
on “"Confidential" 988 conversation records shared with corporations”Submitted DSM Disorders Disappear in Statistical Clustering of Psychiatric Symptoms (2024) as a story · 162 points
HN discussionI liked how this blog[0] describes it. Schizophrenia itself isn't a spectrum, but rather you have varying levels of schizophrenia risk genes. They have positive fitness functions (creativity, cognitive flexibility, linguistic skill) until you cross the threshold to schizophrenia. [0] https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/schizophrenia-is-the-pri...
Comment linking /p/schizophrenia-is-the-price-we-pay
on “Schizophrenia study finds new biomarker, drug candidate to treat symptoms”Submitted Personality Disorders as Relational Disorders as a story · 24 points
HN discussionWhy is someone on HIV antivirals if no test ever confirmed them to have HIV? Presumably, they were confirmed as having HIV and have reduced its load to beneath detectable levels but that doesn't erase the previous confirmation. I think that's all an aside, though, if not the ICD (as suggested by another poster) or the DSM definition initially used, which definition is correct? OP, I think, is clearly harkening back…
Comment linking /p/autisms-confusing-cousins
on “Researchers Discover Molecular Difference in Autistic Brains”Submitted Rewriting the Grand Plan of Clinical Neuroscience as a story · 2 points
HN discussion