- About the Authors
Awais Aftab is Attending Psychiatrist at North-coast Behavioral Healthcare (Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services) and Clinical Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He is involved in curriculum development for teaching philosophy of psychiatry and promoting ‘conceptual competence’ during psychiatry residency training. He leads the interview series “Conversations in Critical Psychiatry” for Psychiatric Times.
Kevin Aho is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He has published widely in the areas of existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of health and illness. He is the author of Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerian Approach to Psychopathology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Existentialism: An Introduction (Polity, 2014, 2nd edn. 2020), Heidegger’s Neglect of the Body (SUNY, 2009) and co-author of Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Disease, and Illness (Lexington, 2008). He is also editor of Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and co-editor of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (Hackett, 2009).
Owen Flanagan was born and raised in Westchester County New York. He received his PhD in 1978 from Boston University. He taught for 16 years (1978–1993) at Wellesley College as Class of 1919 Professor of Philosophy. In 1993 he came to Duke where he is James B. Duke University Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy. He also holds appointments in Psychology and Neuroscience, and is a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience and a steering committee member of the “Philosophy, Arts, and Literature” (PAL) program, and an Affiliate of the Graduate Program in Literature. His work is in Philosophy of Mind and Psychiatry, Ethics, Moral Psychology, Cross-Cultural Philosophy. His latest book is *The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility* (pub. October 2016; Oxford 2017). In 2016–2017, Flanagan was the Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in California. In 2015–2016 Flanagan was Rockefeller Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
Emily Hughes has a PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, a year of which was spent researching at the Martin-Heidegger-Institut in Wuppertal. Her thesis focused on Martin Heidegger’s concept of affect. Other areas of interest include phenomenology, existentialism, the philosophy of psychiatry, and the philosophy of time and temporality. She has taught at UNSW, and for the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.
Stewart Justman directed the Humanities program at the University of Montana and writes about literature and medicine. His work has appeared in many journals, including Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and Philosophy and Literature.
Sarah Kamens, PhD, is an interdisciplinary researcher and clinical psychologist whose work focuses on theories of mental distress, the evolution of diagnostic concepts, and phenomenological approaches to extreme states. After studying at the European Graduate School Division of Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought, she received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Fordham University. Her predoctoral and postdoctoral clinical training took place at the Yale University School of Medicine, where she focused on Adult Community Mental Health and Specialized Treatment Early in Psychosis. Sarah spent 2 years as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor at Wesleyan University, and she recently joined the SUNY College at Old Westbury Psychology Department as an Assistant Professor. In 2019, Sarah received the Sigmund Koch Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from American Psychological Association Division 24: Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (SAGE). Sarah is currently working on a book about a phenomenological-existential reconceptualization of the “schizophrenia” diagnosis.
Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC, is the James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University and Co-director of the Culture, Mind and Brain Program, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, and Director of the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he conducts research on culturally responsive mental health services for...