Omar Pinjari, Psychiatrist

Dr. Omar Pinjari is a board-certified psychiatrist with 18 years of experience in the field of psychiatry. After completing his medical school in India, he forged a career which saw him train in the UK and the United States. After successfully completing his core psychiatry training and attaining his post graduate diploma in mental health from the prestigious Queen’s University, Belfast, he worked as a Staff Psychiatrist for 5 years in the suburbs of city of Cardiff, Wales treating patients struggling with depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety etc. His interests at this time were treating resistant depression with ECT and he also ran a weekly Lithium clinic. Over the years this became a constant theme in Dr. Pinjari’s career, to adopt newer, more effective evidence-based treatments for mood/anxiety and psychotic disorders. In 2011, Dr. Pinjari moved to the United States after being accepted into the prestigious St. Elizabeth’s Psychiatry residency program in Washington DC and after successful completion accepted an Assistant Professor position at University of Texas, Houston working at the busy, inner-city hospital, UT-HCPC. Here over the last 7 years, he has strived to bring stability in psychiatric patients lives through engaging in innovative, evidence-based treatments. He became the core faculty of the refractory mood disorders treatment program and was given the privileges to perform electroconvulsive therapy and has helped scores of patients struggling with refractory depression. He was also recognized for his expertise in the treatment of schizophrenia and psychosis patients and was promoted to the Director of Schizophrenia unit/program at UT-Harris County Psychiatric Center in 2018. His skills in psychopharmacology and leadership skills saw him become the Chair of the pharmacy & therapeutics committee at UT-HCPC. Dr. Pinjari is not only an excellent Psychiatrist with exemplary clinical skills, but he is also a doctor who understands people at the human level. His own experience growing up in rural India, seeing the vagaries of poverty and disease, spurred him to become a physician. And his experience later in medical school where he saw immense stigma towards mental illness motivated him to specialize in Psychiatry. For his dedication and contribution to patient care in psychiatry, Dr. Pinjari has been recognized as one of the top doctors by the H-Texas magazine consecutively from 2017 to 2021.