Crossroads in Therapy: Notes on Access

In the final episode of our series we discuss the impact of interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary thought and collaboration on access as praxis and the value of bringing in learnings from allied professions/disciplines into therapy process. Guest speaker Aishwarya Srinivasan is a career and workplace strategy coach, mental health researcher, and PhD student examining ADHD careers and support in the workplace. 

What can the disability justice movement teach us about how we bridge the gap between availability and accessibility in mental healthcare?

In this episode, we speak to Janani Vaidya, a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst and researcher, to understand how we can unlearn our rigid ideas about mental healthcare, the scope this provides for increasing accessibility of services and yet another metaphor in this series, this time about a wall, to visualize what accessibility can look like in practice. 

How can we draw from the neurodiversity movement to redefine outcomes from therapy?

In this episode we critically examine ableism in recovery-focused approaches to therapy drawing deep insights from the speaker, Anushree, a non-binary, queer and neurodivergent mental healthcare professional whose practice is informed by trauma informed, queer affirmative and neurodivergence affirmative lenses. 

What are the ethical responsibilities of therapists in mental healthcare work?

In this episode, Dr. Chetna Duggal, Associate Professor at TISS Mumbai, talks about navigating ethical responsibilities and guilt as therapists and using different models of therapy, use of language and setting up the frame of therapy in the Indian context. 

What impacts a person's journey towards accessing mental healthcare?
In conversation with Dr. Travis Heath, a licensed psychologist with nearly two decades of experience working in the community and Lamia Bagasrawala, a doctoral student in school psychology at Michigan State University, USA and practising psychotherapist who has been instrumental in conceptualising the School Initiative for Mental Health Advocacy (SIMHA), at TISS.  

In the first episode of this series, mental health researchers and practitioners from the Belongg Tangent MHI teams come together to unpack the history of ‘care’, its evolution and why access is a relevant conversation today. We discuss what access looks like in our work and how we try/struggle to make our services accessible. During our conversation, we stumbled upon a doorway metaphor that we believe will help practitioners and seekers of mental healthcare dwell on what access means to them.