Being Uncomfortable is not an Excuse | Suzanne Barakat, M.D., Exec. Dir., UCSF HHRI

In this episode, Joanne Conroy, M.D., President and CEO of Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, speaks with Suzanne Barakat, M.D., Assistant Professor, UCSF, Director, UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative, about a devastating personal tragedy resulting from prejudice and Islamophobia, and about Dr. Barakat’s subsequent work in social justice and civil rights, particularly in the arena of facilitating the asylum-seeking process.

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Suzanne Barakat, MD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family & Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she serves as the executive director of the Health and Human Rights Initiative. She completed her residency in Family & Community Medicine at UCSF. Previously, Dr. Barakat contributed to a first-of-its-kind mood screener and mental health assessment of Arabic-speaking communities worldwide, and worked at makeshift polyclinics and state hospitals serving thousands of refugees along the Turkish-Syrian border. She also serves as Board Chair for Our Three Winners Foundation. She has been outspoken about the role of advocacy and allyship in countering the rising tide of Islamophobia, and has given a TED talk on the subject. She is passionate about women’s health, global health, and social justice.

[johnnymookergee]

Barakat, who has worked in Syrian and Turkish refugee camps, is so steeped in the discourse of trauma that she is unable to disentangle her personal tragedy from geopolitics, or vice versa. I took an hour to listen to a recording of one of her recent presentations. Her narrative veers raggedly from the Syrian civil war to her brother’s murder to the Palestinians to her grandmother’s death to the 2023 Turkish earthquake to U.S. asylum policy. She is obviously a broken person, and one wonders why she is given so much prominence as an authority to speak on so many matters.