S. Nassir Ghaemi

Born in 1966 in Tehran, Iran, Nassir Ghaemi immigrated to the US at the age of 5 with his family and was raised in McLean, Virginia by his father Kamal Ghaemi MD, a neurosurgeon and neurologist, and his mother Guity Kamali Ghaemi, an art historian. A graduate of McLean High School (1984), he received a BA in history from George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia, 1986), and an MD degree from the Medical College of Virginia (MCV, Richmond, Virginia, 1990). He then completed an internal medicine internship at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA (1991), an adult psychiatry residency at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital (Belmont, MA 1994), and a research fellowship in psychopharmacology at MGH (1995).

Since then, he has been an academic psychiatrist specializing in mood disorders, and, with the exception of two stints away (in Washington DC and Atlanta), has worked mostly in the Boston area, mainly in Harvard-affiliated hospitals (MGH and Cambridge Hospital). In 2008, he took a position as professor of psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, where he directs the Mood Disorders and Psychopharmacology Programs.

His clinical work and research has focused on depression and manic-depressive illness. In this work, he has published over 100 scientific articles, over 30 scientific book chapters, and he has written or edited five books. He serves on a number of editorial boards of psychiatric journals, is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, an elected officer of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD), and chairman of the Diagnostic Guidelines Task Force of ISBD.

After his medical training, he obtained an MA in philosophy from Tufts University in 2001, and a MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004. Outside of his clinical work and research, his main interests are in philosophy and public health. His interests in philosophy center on understanding the mind and mental illness, but also extend to an interest in Islamic thinkers and Sufism. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry.

In 2003, he published "The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness", a book about the nature of the mind and mental illness, from a perspective informed by both clinical psychiatry and modern philosophy.

His favorite writers are Walker Percy and William James.

His next forthcoming book in press for late 2009 publication is: "The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Eclectic Psychiatry Examined" with Johns Hopkins University Press. This book is a sequel to "The Concepts of Psychiatry" (2003).

He manages an active blog about his experiences and thoughts as a psychiatrist at http:/​/​blogs.psychologytoday.com/​blog/​mood-swings