“do not despair of Allah’s mercy” (Quran 39:53)

The SFH Foundation is hosting a conversation on
Muslim Mental Health Today

26th August
12pm South Africa
11am UK

Between Muna Bilgrami, Yaquta Morton, Sabnum Dharamsi and Abdullah Maynard

This pilot podcast explores the dimensions of mental health, Islam and spirituality.
The current Covid pandemic period has brought a huge rise in the frequency and intensity of mental health issues – such as anxiety and depression. Our intention is to start a conversation by mapping out what mental health and spirituality may mean in 2021 during a pandemic for people of faith.

Some of the topics we will be covering are:
What is mental health? Naming the prevalent issues of our time including: trauma anxiety and depression
Intersections of religion, race, gender and spirituality with mental health
Guilt and shame
Spiritual Bypassing
Painful emotions and how to be with them
Traditional and emerging modalities for healing

Please note that we will not be addressing severe, clinical stages of mental health.

If you have questions which you would like to put forward during the course of the podcast, we will try to address them in a series of future podcasts. Your collaboration will help us create useful discussions that will insha’allah benefit all the listeners.

The participants

Facilitating this conversation is Muna who is completing a PhD on a contemporary Sufi master and his students, and has a background in publishing books on Islam, radio broadcasting and teaching.

Based in Sweden, Yaquta is a great-grandmother, and retired community health educator specializing in Traditional Chinese Medicine, QiGung, permaculture design and self-care.

Sabnum has spent a lifetime raising awareness around mental health, previously in the drugs and alcohol fields, race and social justice, HIV and AIDs, sex and relationships and holistic/spiritual well-being at the individual, community and research/strategic level. For many years now her primary focus is the development and teaching of accredited Islamic Counselling in Britain, the first courses of their kind.

With an extensive background in psychology and humanistic counselling, Abdullah has worked with NGOs and in the public sector with a number of central government departments in the UK. Abdullah wrote the 2007 Muslim Mental Health Scoping Report for the Department of Health and Social Care and is also the chairperson of the Lateef Project, a major Islamic counselling service whose work includes serving NHS key workers.