Seyyed Nassir Ghaemi (born 1966) is an American 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.

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 views as underutilized; and a critic of the DSM diagnostic system for its emphasis on reliability of diagnosis over scientific validity.

His writings consistently underscore the importance of psychopathology and theoretical pluralism to understand the complexities of mental life. He cites as his mentors Leston Havens, Elvin Semrad, and Karl Jaspers, among others.^[1]

Ghaemi is among the most prominent and widely cited psychiatrists of his generation. According to his Google Scholar profile, his work has been cited over 20,000 times.^[2]

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 receive an M.A. in philosophy from Tufts University in 2001, where he studied with the prominent philosopher Daniel Dennett, and an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004.^[3] He completed his residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, both affiliates of Harvard Medical School.^[1]

He works and sees patients at Tufts Medical Center, where he is director of the Mood Disorder Program and the Psychopharmacology Consultation Clinic,^[4] and also maintains a small private practice in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2025, he completed a term as President of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society.

• Letters to a Medical Student, and other essays
• Clinical Psychopharmacology: Principles and Practice
• On Depression: Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World
• A First-Rate Madness: Exploring the Links between Mental Illness and Leadership
• The Rise and Fall of the Biopsychosocial Model: Reconciling Art and Science in Psychiatry
• A Clinician's Guide to Statistics and Epidemiology in Mental Health: Measuring Truth and Uncertainty
• Mood Disorders: A Practical Guide
• The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness
• Polypharmacy in Psychiatry

• The Psychiatry Letter