Indian Therapist for NRIs: Online Counselling from India

Finding a therapist abroad who understands where you come from is harder than it should be. You can end up spending the first several sessions explaining the background: what joint family obligation actually means, why a decision about your career is not only yours to make, why you cannot simply set a boundary and be done with it.

Rooh Mind Care works with Indians living overseas, in the Gulf, the UK, the US and Canada, Europe, Australia, Singapore and elsewhere. Your therapist is an Indian clinician who does not need that context explained.

What clients abroad bring

• Isolation: a full calendar and still nobody who really knows you.
• Guilt about ageing parents: being the child who left, managing care from a distance, and the dread attached to every unexpected call. See support for NRIs with ageing parents.
• Family expectations at long range: marriage, money sent home, career choices debated across a video call.
• Identity and belonging: not quite of the country you live in, no longer quite of the one you left.
• Visa and immigration stress: the particular strain of a life contingent on a document, and of jobs that cannot be left.
• Racism and workplace exclusion: including the kind too deniable to name.
• Relationships across distance: long distance marriage, or a partner who does not share the cultural context. See couples therapy for NRIs.
• Return, or not: the decision that never quite resolves.

Why a therapist who shares the context matters

A well-meaning therapist unfamiliar with South Asian family structures may read ordinary interdependence as enmeshment, and push towards a kind of independence that would cost you your family. A therapist who understands the context can help you work out what you actually want, which is sometimes more separation, sometimes less, and usually something more specific than either.

Rooh Mind Care is also queer-affirmative and neurodivergent-affirmative, which matters especially if you are not out to family at home.

Migration guilt, homesickness and acculturation stress

Three things come up so often, and are so rarely named properly, that they are worth setting out on their own.

"Log kya kahenge", eight thousand kilometres away

Distance does not switch off the community. It moves it online, into WhatsApp groups and the diaspora network in your city, where news travels between continents faster than it ever did between neighbourhoods.

For many clients the hardest decisions (a divorce, a career change, coming out, marrying outside the community, not marrying at all) are shaped less by what they want than by what will be said, and by who will carry it: usually a mother, in a drawing room, in another country. A therapist who has to have that explained is already several sessions behind. One who understands it can get to the actual question, which is rarely "should I care what people think" and almost always "what am I prepared to pay, and for what".

Therapy in Hindi and seven other languages

You can have therapy in Hindi, English, Kannada, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam or Sindhi. This matters more than it sounds. People who have lived abroad for years are usually fluent in English and still find that grief, shame and childhood memory come more honestly in the language those things originally happened in. Working in your second language adds a layer of translation between feeling it and saying it, and therapy is difficult enough without it.

Affordable therapy from India, without a drop in standard

Sessions are charged at Indian rates: ₹2,500 ($25) with one of our psychologists, ₹3,500 ($35) with a Senior Clinical Psychologist, against the $100 to $250 typical of private therapy in the US, UK or Canada. A package of 16 sessions brings it to ₹1,875 ($18.75) a session. For people without mental health cover on their insurance, or facing months on a waiting list, that is often the difference between starting therapy and continuing to put it off.

The saving comes from where the practice is based, not from what you get. Our Clinical Psychologists are Anamika Rawlani, our Founder, trained at RINPAS, Ranchi, one of India’s most prestigious mental health institutes, founded in 1925; Dr Poornima Chandrashekar, with a doctorate (Ph.D) in clinical psychology from NIMHANS, Bengaluru, India’s leading mental health institute, the AIIMS of mental health; and Divyanshi Tolani. Our other psychologists are Counselling Psychologists, with Tanisha bringing expertise in neuropsychology.

Almost all of our clinicians are professionally registered. The few who are not yet registered work under the close supervision of our Founder and of senior clinical supervisors from leading institutions such as the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, so that every client receives care of the same high standard.

Practical details

Fees

Packages bring the fee per session down by up to 25%: a package of 16 sessions works out at ₹1,875 ($18.75) per session. Fees outside India are shown in rupees at ₹100 to the dollar. Euro figures shown on the site are indicative conversions; the exact amount debited depends on your card issuer's rate. See all package options →

Common questions