The Therapy Gap: Why Mainstream Wellness Fails Brown Immigrants

India-West Staff Reporter

“I tried therapy once. The woman asked me to set boundaries with my mother – I never went back.”

That’s how Priya, a 29-year-old software engineer from Palo Alto, described her first (and only) attempt at therapy. For many South Asian immigrants like her, the journey toward mental wellness begins with hope but ends in quiet disappointment. Not because they don’t want to heal but because the system wasn’t built for them.

Cultural Fit

While the U.S. mental health industry has expanded rapidly, its frameworks often feel emotionally inaccessible to brown communities. It’s not a matter of awareness; it’s a matter of cultural mismatch.

Try explaining guilt-laced obedience, the stigma of seeking help, or the burden of immigrant exceptionalism to someone who hasn’t lived it.

Often, what comes back are well-meaning but shallow solutions: “just set boundaries,” “try journaling,” or “say NO more often.”

Even when South Asians do make it into therapy, they’re met with blind spots. In many of our families, love is shown through sacrifice and duty, not words. But when these dynamics are filtered through a Western lens, they’re often misunderstood or labelled “toxic.”

Language, both literal and emotional, becomes a barrier. Many clients can’t fully articulate trauma in English or feel their spiritual and cultural coping tools are dismissed altogether.

Representation, too, is sparse. Without shared identity or lived experience, therapy can feel like emotional translation work which defeats the point of therapy in the first place.

Healing

In response, culturally sensitive mental health platforms are beginning to quietly rewrite the rules. One such example is TheraWin, which connects South Asian clients with therapists who just get it; whether it’s understanding why “log kya kahenge” (What will people say?) still keeps us up at night, or how naming your child “Ananya” instead of “Ann” can carry emotional weight.

“We often hear from clients that they’re relieved they don’t have to explain themselves from scratch,” says Shozo Kamiya, founder of TheraWin Health.

As more brown therapists step into the spotlight and care models begin to shift, the narrative is changing – not by disrupting the system, but by rehumanizing it. Because sometimes healing doesn’t start with a diagnosis. It starts with someone who understands where you come from.

For more: https://therawin.health/ based in California.