Psychiatrist Forwards Understanding of Islam, MH Care for Muslim Women

When Rania Awaad, M.D., traveled to Damascus to participate in an Islamic sciences summer program when she was 14, little did she know she was embarking on a lifelong journey that would one day lead her to respond to the mental health needs of Muslim women.

Now, after completing certification in Qur’an and Islamic law as well as a residency and fellowship in psychiatry, Awaad is a clinical instructor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and director of its recently launched Muslims and Mental Health Research Lab. Awaad, who was an APA/SAMHSA fellow from 2011 to 2013, valued the mentorship she received during the fellowship—it was key in helping her form her career objectives, and it funded her line of research on historical understandings of mental illness during the Golden Era of Islam.

She recently returned from Jordan where she was providing mental health support to Syrian refugees and took some time out to talk with Psychiatric News and share details of her unusual journey to becoming a psychiatrist and her hopes for her young lab.

I have this unusual trajectory of how I got into mental health. I don’t think I ever expected to be here. When I was 14, I spent the summer in Damascus studying Islamic sciences. I fell in love with the culture and the people and the traditions. As a young girl, it was very empowering to meet and interact with female scholars there. I continued to go back to Syria to study Islamic sciences throughout high school, college, and even medical school.

I was born in Cairo and moved to the United States when I was 3. At first, my interests in Islamic law were driven by a personal desire to better understand the Muslim culture and my own Muslim background. Once I discovered how underrepresented female scholars who could explain Islamic law were, I decided to seek a formal Islamic law degree. Along the way, I did quite a bit of teaching.

I come from a family of physicians. I think by default, especially being a bright kid, I was expected to go into medicine. But my parents were also open to me studying abroad. I don’t think any of us thought my studies in Damascus would formalize into a degree in law. It happened organically. Degrees or certifications in classical Islamic law are called Ijaza. I hold several Ijazas in various branches in the Islamic law. If I were to add my time in Damascus altogether, it would equal a total of five years of intense study over time.

During medical school, I would attend my medical school classes in the morning, and in the evenings I would teach or take advanced courses in Islamic law to complete my Islamic law certifications.

It was probably in those first couple years of medical school that I entertained the idea of a career in psychiatry. At the time, I was teaching Islamic courses to Muslim women. When I would meet with my female students, the conversation would inadvertently go from dry legalistic discussions to real-life issues and questions. I felt that the women I worked with were really opening up to me.

As I became an authority figure within the religious role, I found that spirituality offered a flexible framework from which to address general well-being, including the stigma surrounding mental illness. I also came to the realization that I was starting to do a lot of counseling without much of a foundation. With the encouragement of my mentors, psychiatry seemed like a natural fit.

In June 2014, I completed my psychiatry residency and a postdoctoral clinical research fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine. The clinical focus of my fellowship was on women’s mental health, and my research was specifically on Muslim women.

In November 2014, we officially opened the Muslims and Mental Health Research Lab, where we are working on several lines of research, including studying ancient medical manuscripts from the 7th through the 12th Islamic Golden Era in order to identify how mental illness was understood and treated in Islamic history. Other research we’re doing involves studies on the attitudes and perceptions of mental illness among American Muslim women. The lab is also focused on developing psychometric scales specifically for Muslims—such as religiosity, acculturation, and identity scales. A portion of our work is also focused on international populations such as Syrian refugees and Muslims in Europe. There is also an effort dedicated to developing a religiously congruent psychotherapeutic framework for treating Muslims.

I’m also a professor at the Zaytuna College in Berkeley—the first Muslim liberal arts college in America. I also direct the Rahmah Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating Muslim women and girls in Islamic knowledge.

I’m definitely a dreamer. I would say I’m focused on the here and now and nurturing this young lab. I hope the work it produces will fill major gaps in the literature and our understanding of this growing population.

There’s a lot of confusion among people about Muslims, but also among Muslims themselves with everything that is happening both in America and abroad. I am confident that, in the near future, the lab will be playing a major role, not just in research but also in psychoeducation, mentorship, and leadership. ■