Tue, 04/05/2022 - 12:24
Dr. Samir Ibrahim is one of the Clinical TMS Society’s highly valued international members and is one of just twelve psychiatrists currently practicing TMS in Australia. He admits patients at three private hospitals in Melbourne and has truly built a name for himself over the past thirty years. “I was offered the position of a specialist psychiatrist by a hospital in Australia,” Dr. Ibrahim says of his decision to leave his home country of Egypt in 1993. At that time, he knew little about TMS but became more involved in the early 2000’s.
“TMS is something we read about in the 90’s, but publications were not very elaborate nor frequent,” Dr. Ibrahim explains. “In 2004 there was a CINP (International College of Neuropsychopharmacology) conference in Paris…and there was a combined session for neuromodulation…Mark George was there as well as others talking about ECT and [TMS], and I was quite curious about what Mark George had to say.”
From that moment, Dr. Ibrahim embarked on a journey to learn all he could about the relatively new neuromodulation technique. He attended an APA workshop on TMS in 2005, where he met prominent TMS experts Mark George and Zyad Nahas in person. The following year, Dr. Ibrahim got his first TMS machine. He worked with Professor Paul Fitzgerald, the first psychiatrist to offer TMS treatment in Australia, and Dr. Ibrahim treated his first TMS patient on September 7, 2007.
Since then, he has trained many doctors and nurses in TMS. “It has been spreading…I know every private hospital in Melbourne as TMS machines now, and the number of psychiatrists working in the TMS field is multiplying very quickly,” he says. In addition to increasing the availability of TMS in Australia, Dr. Ibrahim is also passionate about promoting mental health awareness within the immigrant community.
“As an Egyptian, and a Coptic Orthodox, I was embedded in my community…and I started to see there was a great need for immigrants to know more about a number of things, including mental health, problems of adaptation and acculturation, keeping in mind the big difference in culture and the big gap between generations,” Dr. Ibrahim explains. He worked to develop several parenting and relationship programs designed to reduce conflict and thereby reduce mental illness. It was this devotion to his community that led him to be nominated for the Order of Australia Medal, which he won in 2019. The award was established by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975 to recognize outstanding achievement and meritorious service to Australians.
In addition to the great work he has been doing in Australia, Dr. Ibrahim has also been a dedicated member of the Clinical TMS Society for more than ten years. “I believe it is a great platform for education and collegiate support,” he says. He currently sits on the Education and Membership committees, where he and his colleagues are working to get PULSES into Australia as well as to increase international membership. “I believe TMS should have a global impact,” Dr. Ibrahim says. “It is a great tool of therapy and so many millions can benefit.”