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Sami Timimi.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist and Author
Sami Timimi is a British child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author, now retired from clinical practice after more than thirty years in the National Health Service. He qualified in medicine at the University of Dundee in 1988, became a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1992 and a Fellow of the College in 2012. Writing from a critical psychiatry perspective, he has published over a hundred and fifty scientific articles and dozens of book chapters on childhood, psychotherapy, behavioural problems and cross-cultural psychiatry, and is the developer, with his colleagues, of the Relational Awareness Programme, a group model for parents and carers built on the premise that distress can only be understood in its relational context.
About Sami.
His career has been shaped by a sustained argument: that psychiatric diagnoses are cultural constructions rather than natural entities, and that treating them as objective facts has real consequences for the children and families who receive them. Rather than leaving that argument at the level of critique, he has spent his working life building clinical alternatives to it, developing service models grounded in context, relationship and development instead of classification.
He has led multiple service developments in child and adolescent mental health and holds a number of innovation awards. He was the consultant for the team named Child and Adolescent Team of the Year at the 2023 annual awards of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
He has authored seven books, co-edited four and co-authored two more. His most recent, Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity, was published in March 2025 and has been translated into several languages. He is a regular keynote speaker at national and international conferences and contributes frequently to press, broadcast media and podcasts
