HE told a patient being treated for depression that if she failed to follow Jesus she would end up in hell with her abusive ex-husband, told a grieving mother who had a stillborn baby to ask God for forgiveness, and compared lesbians to paedophiles.

Alexander Anthony Sharah, who practised in Merrylands in Western Sydney, has been barred by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal from registering as a medical practitioner for two years.

The Health Care Complaints Commission brought the case against the psychiatrist following a litany of complaints from former patients.

The overriding concern was Mr Sharah’s habit of bringing religion into the therapy room.

A 48-year-old woman, known as Patient B, said attending Mr Sharah’s practice was like, “walking into a church” and noted a cross on the wall and on his desk, and “a few statues of Mother Mary holding baby Jesus”.

The woman was being treated for depression and for assistance after being discharged from an alcohol detoxification program. She confided in Mr Sharah that she had been regularly sexually abused since she was 11 by a man who, at the time, was her mother’s boyfriend and to who she ultimately married when still a teenager.

During a discussion with Mr Sharah about her emotional state the woman told the tribunal he had told her, “there are always people worse off than you, you should get over it”.

In the judgement, handed down yesterday, it stated that the patient accused Mr Sharah of giving her inappropriate religious advice, “with words to the effect of, if she didn’t go to church and show Jesus that she loved him, she would end up in hell with her former husband and her sl*t of a mother”.

However, “if she prayed to Jesus she would end up in heaven one day with the practitioner playing football”, it read.

‘IT WAS GOD’S WILL’

A 31-year-old woman, known as Patient D, who consulted Mr Sharah in 2013 after she gave birth to a stillborn child said the psychiatrist advised she ask for God’s forgiveness for her son’s death and that his passing was God’s will.

“I am not religious in any way, but I was too vulnerable and absolutely petrified of the terrible place I was in emotionally to say anything,” the patient said in her witness statement.

“He also kept using words like ‘abortion’ and ‘termination’, which absolutely mortified me, as that was not what we did to our baby boy.

“After the appointment, I was in a state of shock. I was shaking, I couldn’t breathe.”

A patient who saw Mr Sharah on multiple occasions between 2004 and 2013 said he regularly brought up religion during consultations.

But it was one particular meeting, where Mr Sharah compared gay people to child sex abusers, that particularly shocked the patient.

“Lesbians don’t know that they are doing something wrong so we still have to love them,” she reported Mr Sharah as saying. “It’s the same as paedophiles, they don’t know they are doing something wrong so we still have to love them.”

MAY NEVER WORK AGAIN

The psychiatrist admitted making the comments or, in some cases, said he couldn’t recall the events.

Mr Sharah, who graduated in medicine in the late 1950s and obtained a diploma in psychiatric medicine in 1972, practised continuously until late 2013. From 1998 he worked solely in private psychiatric practice.

He unsuccessfully stood as the Christian Democratic Party’s candidate for the seat of Reid in western Sydney in the 2007 federal election and also failed to get elected in the nearby electorate of Parramatta in the 2010 and 2013 polls.

His social media profiles, which haven’t been updated since 2012, show him to be a keen supporter of the Men’s Justice Movement and that, in his opinion, there was an “imbalance in the handling of men and women in several areas in our society”.

The tribunal handed down a finding of unsatisfactory professional conduct and said that while an exploration of a patient’s religious beliefs might be necessary for treatment or diagnoses, in these cases, “the practitioner was pressing his religious beliefs on patients in a proselytising way”.

At age 80, it’s unlikely Mr Sharah will ever practice again.