Nassir Ghaemi

Nassir Ghaemi (born 1966) is an academic psychiatrist, author, and Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and Lecturer on Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He has written several books on mental illness and mood disorders and has published over 300 articles in the scientific literature. His interests lie primarily in the history and philosophy of psychiatry, psychiatric classification, and bipolar mood illness.

Nassir Ghaemi
Born	1966 Tehran, Iran
Academic background
Education	McLean High School
Alma mater	George Mason University (B.A.) Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University (M.D.) Tufts University (M.A.) Harvard School of Public Health (M.P.H.)
Academic work
Discipline	psychiatrist
Institutions	Tufts Medical Center Harvard Medical School
Notable works	A First-Rate Madness
Website	http://www.nassirghaemi.com/

Among his other views, Ghaemi is a proponent of the concept of manic depressive illness in the original Kraepelinian sense; a proponent of lithium therapy, which he sees as underutilized; and a critic of the DSM diagnostic system for its emphasis on reliability of diagnosis over scientific validity.

Life

He immigrated to the United States at the age of 5 from Tehran, Iran, and attended McLean High School in McLean, Virginia. He received his B.A. from George Mason University in 1986, and later a medical degree from Medical College of Virginia. He then went on to get an M.A. in philosophy from Tufts University in 2001, and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004.^[1] He works and sees patients at Tufts Medical Center, where he is director of the Psychopharmacology Consultation Clinic, and also maintains a small private practice in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2025, he completed a term as President of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society.

Works

• Polypharmacy in Psychiatry (2002)
• On Depression: Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World
• A First-Rate Madness
• The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry
• The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness
• A Clinician's Guide to Statistics and Epidemiology in Mental Health: Measuring Truth and Uncertainty
• Mood Disorders: A Practical Guide, Second Edition