Dr Sheetal Kirpekar

Dr Sheetal Kirpekar is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist with over a decade of experience working in mental health. She is a Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (MRCPsych) and is on the Specialist Register for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

She trained in Psychiatry at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the Royal London Hospital, and East London and South Essex NHS Foundation Trusts, where she worked with children and young people across a wide range of presentations, including complex cases requiring careful, sensitive judgement. Her training included some of the UK’s most respected centres for children’s mental health, including Great Ormond Street’s nationally recognised Social Communication Disorders Clinic, one of the UK’s leading services for assessing high-functioning autism.

She remains firmly guided by UK NICE guidelines, alongside bringing an awareness of emerging treatments, evolving evidence, and international clinical guidelines.
She spent several years working in New York in a leadership role in a high-volume, multi-state telepsychiatry service, which exposed her to a broad range of clinical presentations and included advising other clinicians on complex and high-risk cases. During this time, she also trained in Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) at Columbia University with one of its main developers and worked on adapting the model for scalable use in resource-limited settings. IPT is an approach she draws on directly in her work with young people and families.

Dr Kirpekar believes good psychiatric care begins with truly listening to the child, the parents, and to the people around them. She works closely with families and schools to build a full picture of each child’s world before thinking about treatment. She sees diagnosis as a way of making sense of a child’s experiences, unlocking the right support, and helping them understand and build on who they are.