Abrar has spent more than two decades working with humans whose experiences refuse to stay neatly inside the categories created to explain them.

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He trained first as a physician, graduating from Sri Ramachandra University in 2002 as Gold Medallist in Surgery, before completing specialist training in General Adult and Liaison Psychiatry in London. Liaison psychiatry took him directly to the meeting place between physical medicine and mental health. And he stayed there.

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His work increasingly centred on some of medicine's more difficult presentations: medically unexplained symptoms, functional neurological disorder and dissociative seizures. Real symptoms. Real impairment. Real humans. And often no single discipline with a sufficient explanation for what was happening.

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1. What do we do when the body is expressing something medicine cannot adequately explain through structure or disease?

2. What happens when neurological symptoms, physiology, psychological experience, trauma, relationships and environment are all relevant to the same presentation?

3. Where exactly does physical become psychological?

4. Where does illness become adaptation?

5. Where does the patient end and their context begin?

6. And what happens if the boundaries themselves are part of what prevents us from seeing the whole human clearly?

 

Abrar has built a career inside those questions. HOSA gave them somewhere larger to go.

Medicine needs specialisms. Science needs categories. Healthcare needs diagnoses.

They allow us to look closely. But humans do not experience themselves in departments.

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A nervous system does not stop where psychiatry begins.

Culture does not sit outside physiology.

Relationships do not cease to matter when someone enters a clinic.

Psychological experience can alter the body without making the physical experience imaginary.

And a diagnosis can be entirely legitimate while still telling us remarkably little about why this human, with this history, in these conditions, is organised this way now.

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Abrar knows this territory unusually well.

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He has worked clinically and scientifically with people experiencing medically unexplained symptoms, functional neurological disorder and dissociative seizures. He served as Principal Investigator for the national CODES randomised controlled trial for dissociative seizures, subsequently published in The Lancet Psychiatry.

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His research has also explored EMDR for functional neurological disorder and medically unexplained symptoms — including not only whether an intervention might help, but patients' own experience of what happened.

Over time, the same inquiry has moved beyond the clinical encounter.

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Abrar founded Healing Across Barriers, extending his work into culturally responsive, trauma-informed mental health care and bringing communities, practitioners and educators into the conversation.

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Because the barriers affecting human wellbeing are not only biological or psychological.

They can be relational. Professional. Cultural. Social. Institutional.

Sometimes the barrier is between disciplines.

Sometimes it is between doctor and patient.

Sometimes it is between what a person is experiencing and the language available to explain it.

 

Abrar's work has increasingly been about crossing those barriers without losing the precision each side contributes.

That is precisely where he meets HOSA. HOSA asks whether we can finally see the whole human they belong to.

Abrar qualified in medicine from Sri Ramachandra University in Chennai, India, in 2002, graduating as Gold Medallist in Surgery.

 

He subsequently completed Core and Higher Specialist Training through the St Mary's Psychiatry Training Scheme in London, receiving his Certificate of Completion of Training in General Adult and Liaison Psychiatry in 2012. He is a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

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His additional clinical training includes Cognitive Analytic Therapy, EMDR, neuropsychiatry and advanced liaison psychiatry.

His career has spanned NHS and private psychiatry, clinical leadership, service development, education and research. He currently works within Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust's Community Psychological Medicine Service for Medically Unexplained Symptoms alongside his general adult psychiatric practice.

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Abrar has authored or co-authored peer-reviewed work across functional neurological disorder, medically unexplained symptoms, psychopharmacology, public health, assertive outreach and psychiatric practice. His research trajectory includes clinical studies, qualitative inquiry, case reports and work on service design.

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He has also worked beyond the individual patient to change the systems around them — including establishing a stepped-care model bringing clinical health psychology, primary care and psychological services together for medically unexplained symptoms.

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In September 2026, that journey reaches another expression with the publication of his book, i Can Heal: A journey through FND.

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After decades inside medicine, psychiatry, research and some of the most complex places where mind and body meet, his inquiry has not narrowed towards another diagnosis. It has widened towards the whole human. Symptoms, diagnosis, evidence and biology matter. So do history, relationship, environment, meaning and the human experiencing all of it. 

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Abrar knows enough about the parts to respect their precision. And has spent enough of his career between them to know that no one of them gets to claim the whole human. That tension makes HOSA better.

Abrar is HOSA's Chief Clinical Officer, co-architect and researcher.

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His job is to keep bringing HOSA back to the human in front of us.

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We can build a beautiful architecture that makes perfect sense on paper and still miss the person entirely. We can correctly identify a mechanism and completely miss what is maintaining it. We can create relief and call it recovery. We can name the diagnosis and still have very little idea what to do next.

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Abrar has spent much of his career in exactly these gaps.

So he asks different questions of HOSA.

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1. Does this actually help us understand this person better?

2. Why did this intervention work here and not there?

3. Are we looking at the problem, or are we looking at the consequence of something further upstream?

4. Why did that change disappear as soon as life got difficult again?

5. What would have to be different for it to hold?

6. And, probably the most important one:

7. Does seeing the Whole change what we do next?

 

It has to. If HOSA can show us how a human is currently organised, it should help us understand what is maintaining that organisation, what is possible from here and where our attention belongs first.

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That takes us from  What is the treatment for this diagnosis? to:

What does this human need, in this organisation, under these conditions, now?

 

Sometimes the answer will be exactly what good clinical practice already tells us. Sometimes HOSA may help explain why the right intervention isn't working, or why it is the right intervention at the wrong time. Sometimes we may discover that the thing everyone is working so hard to change isn't actually the thing holding the problem in place.

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And sometimes the human sitting in front of us will prove HOSA wrong. Good. The human gets a vote.

The diagnosis doesn't get the whole vote. Neither does the clinician, the research paper, or HOSA.

 

Abrar has spent his career working with people who don't fit comfortably inside the boundaries between medicine, psychiatry, neurology, body and mind. He knows why those distinctions matter. He also knows what happens when they aren't enough.

 

His job inside HOSA is to make sure that in our effort to see the Whole, we never lose the human.