Welcome to the Oxford Psychiatry Podcast series.
I'm Charlotte Allen, and today I'm here with Mina Faizal, who is a research fellow and consultant and child and adolescent psychiatry.
Her research focuses on the mental health of refugees and asylum seeking children,
and she looks at how to develop services to better meet their needs. Welcome, Mina.
Thank you for talking to us today.
Before we talk about your research, could you just tell me a bit about your career so far and why you chose to do psychiatry?
So I am trained in medicine. I always love medicine.
And I was always interested in chronic diseases and chronic illnesses.
I thought I might get into pain, but in my training, I took a year out and I did a degree in social anthropology, OK?
And at that time I became really interested in different cultural expressions of mental illness.
And that really started me very curious about social environments and the interplay between cultures,
societies and biological processes and materials and services, such and such.
And the party I always thought that I probably would end up in psychiatry because it looked at the
areas that I was most interested in and busted in a way that I thought was quite fascinating.
What role does the factors of our everyday lives potentially play?
A biological processes in our body says a more unusual route into psychiatry.
Yes, well, I've actually come across many versions of similar anthropological interests, actually.
So not that's atypical. And the other thing I did a lot of was travel quite a lot.
So I spent any opportunity that could abroad.
And so that also, I suppose, further cemented my interest in different cultures,
expressions of mental illness and kind of all the same illness, the different cultures.
And and so that started me on my path.
What training did you have to do after you've finished your medical degree? So that I did.
I took a couple of years just in general medical subjects, including neurology, accident and emergency things that were quite important.
And then I started training in psychiatry in Oxford and quite early in my career first when travelling.
So I went to work in Australia with the Aboriginal population as a psychiatrist in a remote part of Australia.
And then I I suppose what I have done is I've never rushed my training, so I took an extra year at a lower rate to do what interested me.
And so having throughout my career, taking years of life possible some different pursuits, different interests.
I also kind of travelled and I spent a year longer at a lower grade so that I
could do a year of psychotherapy training and also start my research career.
That became essential because if I hadn't taken my time, I probably wouldn't have started doing research.
And what inspired you to start doing research in the first place?
Well, I was really curious. I love being a clinician. I love clinical work.
So it was never a desire to be away from that. But that was just so much that I think is an answer and there's so much that needs research doing it.
So I started off doing part time clinical working part time research, and I continued that for about ten years.
So kind of completing my high psychiatric training alongside research.
And how did you find that balance between doing a part time clinical working, part time research?
It really suited me. So you often feel like you're never doing anything particularly well, but that also kind of keeps everything quite interesting,
because whenever you do something, it feels like it's a real treat and it's quite new.
And it suited me because my interests are very clinical and I remain that way.
And that now my main research interest is in refugee children, but also it's just school based mental health services in general.
So my research has always been very clinically driven and is now very much in services.
And I have to provide services and change services and make services responsive to the needs of clinical population.
But not since you're very much a clinical academic combining both parts.
Yes, can I say a bit more about the focus of your current research?
Well, I've been working for many years in refugee,
looking at refugee children and thinking about how they were not presenting in
traditional mental health services in the numbers that you would expect them.
And yet they're all at schools that I was involved in,
a project that I just decided to provide the of service within the school context rather than the traditional hospital clinic setting.
And that became quite an interesting area of work because we were working with schools very closely.
We work in an environment where these young children were spending the majority of their time and they seemed to like to be in a CSA school.
So we'd have that much if you were in a DNA race for not attending appointment rates.
And so it just seemed quite important. And teachers wanted to increasingly talk about all children, not just the subgroup, sort of, you know,
any child that they thought might benefit from some mental health and put of some thinking around their needs within the framework that we can offer.
And so I spent about 10 years working with refugee children, asking questions, conducting research, trying their baseline levels of inner needs,
evaluation service before and after, conducting qualitative interviews with refugee children who'd been seen by themselves at school.
And interestingly, in those interviews, the vast majority of children said they preferred to be seen at school than anywhere else.
So quite a shift to help mental health services. And usually that's right.
Yes.
Yeah, it's actually if you step back and look at countries like the United States of America, they have over 2000 school based mental health clinics.
And if you go to their psychology conferences, I went recently to one and almost a third of psychiatrists that other psychiatrists call
themselves schools that identify themselves as somebody who was in the school setting.
And yet that isn't something we do here. And so I've been working quite closely with lots of health, NHS, Foundation Trust,
which is a local trust here to develop a model of bringing mental health services into the state funded sector schools.
And we're just starting that now. So it's come directly out of my research trust,
but it's a clinical application that's being generalised to children and we're trying to work out how to evaluate that,
how to properly, how to make the findings useful, you know, for schools and services across the country.
So that's a great example of how your research is really shaping clinical
services and shaping clinical practise and having a direct benefit to patients.
Well, we hope so. We have to see what we have to make sure we evaluate it properly.
We ask the right questions. You know, it's likely that a proportion of children will much prefer to be seen at school.
And, of course, the children won't want to see the school.
But we would hope that actually thinking about education, health shouldn't be two separate things.
We shouldn't be thinking the schools, the education and the mental health services in the mental health is actually it makes no sense
to me that mental health services are much better integrated within the education system,
because what we know is that, you know, mental health assists in your academic of time,
that if you've got, you know, academic difficulties, that it would be of value to do a full assessment.
And actually, mental health is integrated fully.
Part of that is that project keeping you busy for the moment, or have you got other ideas of what you want to do in the future?
Well, my main my main funding comes to the NIH, where I have a post-doctoral research fellow looking at developing tools,
psychotherapeutic tools for teachers, teachers and school staff to use with refugee children.
So that's just the side. And just the bulk of my work is that.
But actually, I'm hoping that the instruments that I developed, I'm not at all the trial on General Teachers for children so gives me an opportunity
to immediately extend my research question to make it more generalisable.
OK, that's great.
If anybody wants to learn more about your research or if they want to get involved in doing research for the how after they contact you,
I think the first thing is to encourage anyone who's interested in these kind of questions to contact, you know,
anyone of us in the department here in Oxford and just to do it, you know, it's hard work, but can be very interesting.
If you're into some of these kind of questions, you can email us.
You can look on the websites, either department website or my own website to learn more about the work that's being done in publications where.
Producing whether they're interested. Thank you very much.
That's great to hear a little bit about your work with refugee children and good luck for the rest of your search.
Thank you.