Dr Sabina Dosani

Dr Sabina Dosani is a psychiatrist, writer and researcher at the University of East Anglia. Her academic interests are in the medical humanities. Sabina uses research methods from art, literature, drama and creative writing to help develop nuanced understanding of experiences of illness and healthcare, and to critically examine systems of care. She has taught medical students at the Universities of London and Auckland and is now teaching creative writing to medical students at the University of East Anglia.

Sabina has two MSc degrees, in Mental Health Studies and in Medical Humanities (with distinction), both from King’s College, London, where she developed strong interests in illness narratives, clinical narrative medicine, and the humanities in medical education. A PhD was a natural extension of that work. Sabina will submit her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia in September 2022. Her critical writing investigates how accounts of obstetric ultrasound in contemporary fiction and creative non-fiction can illuminate understanding of women’s relationships with their embryos and foetuses. An early draft of her creative non-fiction, Flesh and Blood, was long-listed for the Mslexia Memoir Awards 2021.

Before embarking on AHRC funded doctoral research, Sabina read Medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and trained in psychiatry at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals, becoming a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2003. She undertook further specialist training in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, London and took up her first consultant psychiatrist role in 2006, at South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. She has worked extensively as a consultant child psychiatrist in England and in New Zealand, developing clinical interests in neurodiversities and in medico-legal work. Alongside her academic career, Sabina continues to practice as an independent psychiatric expert witness.

While working as a junior doctor, Sabina had a parallel career in journalism, writing freelance for national newspapers and magazines and also working as an editor at the BMJ. During that time, she published a book for international medical graduates and five further books on self-help for depression and interventions for bullied children and children with behavioural difficulties.

Sabina has published academically in interdisciplinary fields, including a paper on creative flourishing in the Covid-19 pandemic for the Journal of Holistic Healthcare, a chapter in a book for separating parents, on creative shared-parenting during lockdowns, a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry on the value and benefit of narrative for clinical practice, a reflection on how Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper can aid psychiatric understanding of postnatal psychosis, a first-author paper in the British Medical Journal about discriminatory job titles, which led to a BMA ban on such titles, and an evaluation of digital mental health innovations.

Sabina’s ability to express complex ideas clearly and incisively, and often with flair, led to her being named by the BBC as one of 2022 BBC New Generation Thinkers. In that role, she is making radio programmes based on her research in the medical humanities and contributes to BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking. Recently, she was invited by BBC Radio 3 to write an essay on Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness for Mental Health Awareness Week and to take part in a Royal Society of Literature panel on representations of AIDS on screen, in theatre and in literature. She was been a specialist advisor and presenter on ITV’s The Chasers Roadtrip and was a regular contributor to Sunrise, a New Zealand breakfast television and current affairs programme. She is an enthusiastic communicator, strongly motivated to contribute to public understanding of the medical humanities.