Gulamabbas Lakha

My current research project is a DPhil in Psychiatry, within the Neuroscience, Ethics & Society team, investigating how faith-based concepts and practices can be harnessed to improve accessibility and adherence to interventions for depression, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and mindfulness based approaches, with specific regard to depression in the UK Muslim population. This process brings together my ministry work as a Shaykh with my academic training in psychology, so as to develop new ways of thinking about faith and psychotherapy, in partnership with patients, practitioners and policy makers. This research employs  an empirical ethics methodological framework, supervised by Professor Ilina Singh and Dr Michael Dunn.

This doctoral research has culminated in the development of the Faith Informed Therapy framework, which focuses on ten psychotherapeutic techniques that are central to the major National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) approved interventions for depression and anxiety. This framework facilitates personalised mental health for people from faith communities, as it can be used flexibly by practitioners to calibrate their chosen interventions, ranging from simple ‘external’ presentation of congruence between standard therapies and religion, to deeper ‘internal’ adaptations to interventions, integrating standard concepts and practices with faith adapted ones. In response to the mental health challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic, the FAITH OxCast project will provide ten online videos for six major world religions, in partnership with the Oxford Faculty of Theology & Religion.

I am also interested in the neuroscience of religious experience, having undertaken a pilot study comparing EEG neural correlates of an Islamic mindfulness practice (dhikr) and a common breath-based meditation from NHS approved interventions. Future developments to this research are planned using fMRI neural imaging techniques.

Teaching commitments form a growing component of my activities, including lectures, tutorials, seminars and research supervision for various courses including Mental Health and Religion, Psychology of Religion, Neuroscience & Religion, Islamic Studies, and Medical Ethics, across different academic departments and colleges.

A diverse professional and academic background has created a passion for combining multiple disciplines to develop new mental health treatments, drawing upon my community work over the last decade and  postgraduate studies in psychology, neuroscience, Islamic studies, history and theology.  My previous research includes empirical studies on how ʾakhlāq (ethical and psychological teachings from Islam) may contribute to treating depression and anxiety.  Prior to that I worked with early Arabic primary sources to investigate the reception history of Al-Ṣaḥīfa Al-Sajjādiyya, one of the earliest Islamic prayer manuals, that is rich in positive psychology, commentaries of which had not previously been studied in Western scholarship.

My professional background over the last two decades has been in quantitative finance and I manage an investment firm I founded in 2004, having originally graduated in Economics & Econometrics and subsequently awarded the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Community engagement has been a key activity over the last decade and I am actively involved in working with faith communities, particularly the UK Muslim community, which serves as a constant reminder about the need for practical applications of research, particularly with regard to how existing frameworks in daily life (such as religious practices) can be harnessed for therapeutic benefit and promoting mental health.

My research has employed qualitative methods to explore conceptual and empirical aspects of how Islamic concepts and practices could be used to adapt psychotherapeutic interventions for depression in the UK Muslim community.

The conceptual half builds upon my previous graduate degrees in theology and psychology (CV enclosed), to map points of contact between five core Islamic practices (Qurʾānic scripture, daily prayer, fasting, mindfulness meditation and psalms), with psychological treatments for depression approved by the UK National Health Service (NHS), such as CBT, MBCT, Behavioural Activation, etc.

The empirical half of the thesis draws upon my experience of community work as a Shaykh for over a decade, to explore lived experiences and feedback regarding the above points of contact. We have rich data from both sides of the therapeutic encounter: service users (adult Muslims in the UK who experienced depression); and service providers who have served Muslim patients with depression (psychiatrists, psychologists, GPs / physicians, palliative care doctors and others). The results of the qualitative analysis suggest that such personalised approaches to mental health care can improve accessibility and adherence to treatments, whilst also mitigating stigma.

I hope the project makes a range of contributions. First, through combining conceptual and empirical research, the thesis provides an underpinning framework that can be applied to faith-based adaptations of a range of interventions offered in the UK NHS. This differs from other advances in the literature that seek to create new 'Islamic' psychotherapeutic interventions. Second, it can enable and empower any clinician, regardless of religious background, to provide personalised mental health treatment to Muslims in a way that harnesses Islamic concepts and practices (should the patient desire it). Third, the implementation time and cost would be modest, as the entire framework is about leveraging what is already in place and freely available in the UK NHS, rather than creating new (generally private) treatments, thereby making the proposed framework resource efficient.