Riya is a fictional composite character created to reflect the real, lived emotional experiences of many Indian and South Asian professionals. No client information was used. This post is written by Sabita Nandy, LMFT, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist practicing in Chicago.
This is a story of Indian professionals mental health in Chicago, of Riya.
Riya Looked Successful. Inside, She Felt Completely Alone.
When Riya, a 34-year-old Indian professional living in Chicago, came to therapy, she looked like someone who had everything under control.
A stable marriage. A respected tech job. Parents in India who proudly told relatives she was doing so well. A life that looked perfect on paper.
But the moment she sat down, she said quietly:
| “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” |
Riya’s experience is not unusual. It is one of the most common things I hear from Indian and South Asian adults in Chicago, professionals who appear to be thriving and who are privately exhausted in ways they cannot quite explain to anyone around them.
If any part of that resonates, this post is for you. I am Sabita Nandy, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who was born in India, trained in the United States, and has spent over 20 years practicing in Chicago. I see clients at my Hyde Park office at 1525 E 53rd Street and my Loop office at 125 S Wacker Drive. My work with the South Asian community is personal, professional, and deeply informed by having lived in both worlds.
The Hidden Mental Health Struggles in the Indian and South Asian Community
Growing up in Indian and South Asian households often means absorbing a specific set of rules about how to handle difficulty:
- Stay strong
- Adjust
- Avoid conflict
- Keep family matters private
- Push through without asking for help
These values are not wrong in themselves. In many circumstances they are adaptive, even protective. But they can also create emotional pressure that builds silently for years, with no outlet and no permission to acknowledge that anything is wrong.
The data supports what I see in my practice. Research published by the South Asian Public Health Association identifies mental illness stigma as a major barrier to help-seeking among US South Asians, with personal stigma often exceeding public stigma. And a systematic review published in PMC found that only 8.6 percent of Asian Americans sought mental health services compared to 18 percent of the general US population.
The gap between need and help-seeking is real, and it is driven by culture, not by the absence of suffering.
Many Indian and South Asian adults I work with experience:
- High achievement alongside high anxiety
- Guilt around disappointing parents
- Pressure to be the good child, the strong one, or the family’s success story
- Emotional exhaustion from managing everyone else’s feelings
- Difficulty setting boundaries without experiencing it as betrayal or disrespect
- Feeling disconnected from their partner, their sense of self, or both
| These are not personal failures. They are cultural patterns. They are deeply common. And they are exactly what therapy is designed to address. |
Riya’s Breaking Point Was Quiet, Not Dramatic
Riya did not have a visible crisis. She did not collapse at work or stop functioning. That is one of the things that made it harder to name what was happening.
Instead, she noticed subtle signs that something had shifted:
- Crying after phone calls with her parents, without being able to explain why
- Feeling guilty every time she said no to anyone
- A persistent numbness even when life looked objectively fine
- A sense of responsibility for managing the emotions of everyone around her
- A feeling that she was performing her life rather than actually living it
This particular pattern, the quiet erosion of self that comes from years of emotional suppression and high expectation, is one of the most common presentations I see in immigrant and second-generation therapy. It is not depression in the clinical sense, though it can become that. It is more accurately described as the cumulative cost of never having been given permission to need anything.
Why Indian and South Asian Adults Often Avoid Therapy
When I ask new clients why they waited so long to come, I hear versions of the same things:
| “I should be grateful. Other people have it worse. My parents sacrificed so much. I don’t want to be dramatic. Therapy is for people who can’t handle life.” |
These beliefs are not random. They are the direct product of cultural conditioning that values endurance, minimizes individual emotional need, and treats help-seeking as a form of weakness or ingratitude.
What research on South Asian mental health stigma consistently shows is that stress-related disorders, anxiety, and depression are increasing in South Asian communities, even as stigma keeps many people from addressing them. The suffering is real. The barrier to care is cultural, not personal.
Therapy is not a sign that you cannot handle your life.
Therapy is a sign that you take your life seriously enough to understand it.
What Therapy Actually Looked Like for Riya
In individual therapy, we did not start by diagnosing Riya or prescribing a coping strategy. We started by listening to her actual story, including the parts she had never said out loud to anyone.
We explored:
- The “good daughter” role she had never consciously chosen but had spent her entire life performing
- The guilt she felt around setting any kind of limit on what she gave to others
- The pressure to keep everyone in her life emotionally comfortable, at the cost of her own comfort
- The fear of being judged, misunderstood, or seen as difficult by her family
- The loneliness that comes from being the strong one in every room
- The emotional cost of perfectionism that never felt like enough
We also unpacked the generational messages she had absorbed:
| “Don’t talk back. Family comes first. Don’t make a scene. Adjust. Be grateful.” |
These messages shaped her. They still shape her. But they do not have to define what comes next.
This is the work I call generational healing: understanding what was handed to you, separating what is yours from what was never yours to carry, and beginning to author a different relationship with yourself and the people you love.
The Shift That Changed Everything
Midway through our work together, Riya said something I hear in different forms from many clients:
| “I’m realizing I’m not broken. I’m just tired of carrying everything alone.” |
That moment matters. Not because it resolved everything, but because it changed the frame. She stopped treating her exhaustion as a personal failing and started seeing it as the predictable result of a role she had been assigned, never chosen.
From there, the work became generative rather than just exploratory. She began to:
- Set limits with family members without experiencing it as betrayal or disrespect
- Name her emotions in real time rather than suppressing them until they leaked out in other ways
- Communicate more honestly with her partner about what she was actually experiencing
- Release the pressure to be perfect in every role simultaneously
- Understand her triggers well enough to respond to them rather than just react
- Begin rewriting the internal story she had been telling about who she was and what she owed
She did not lose her culture in this process.
She found herself within it.
That distinction is important. Therapy for South Asian adults is not about abandoning where you come from. It is about having enough clarity and enough space to choose which parts of your heritage you want to carry forward, and which parts were never serving you.
Why This Work Matters for the Indian and South Asian Community in Chicago
Chicago has a significant and growing South Asian population, concentrated in areas including Hyde Park, Devon Avenue, the West and Northwest suburbs, and the broader metropolitan area. Many are professionals: physicians, engineers, academics, lawyers, consultants.
And many are quietly struggling in exactly the ways Riya was struggling.
The specific cultural dynamics that make this difficult include:
- Being raised to endure rather than express
- The fear of family or community judgment
- A tendency to minimize pain through comparison (someone always has it worse)
- An inherited sense of responsibility for the emotional wellbeing of parents and extended family
- The particular exhaustion of being the family’s success story while privately feeling hollow
But emotional health is not optional. It affects your relationships, your work, your sense of identity, and your capacity to be present with the people who matter most to you.
| Therapy gives you a space where you do not have to perform. A space where your emotions make sense. A space where your culture is understood, not explained. |
Does Any Part of Riya’s Story Feel Familiar?
Take a moment with these questions. There are no right answers.
- Do you feel pressure to be the good child, the strong one, or the person who holds everything together?
- Do you avoid expressing conflict or need because it feels like disrespect?
- Do you feel guilty when you prioritize your own wellbeing?
- Do you feel emotionally exhausted even when your life looks fine from the outside?
- Do you feel caught between cultural expectations and who you are or want to become?
- Do you feel like you are performing your life more than living it?
If even one of these resonates, that is not a small thing. That is a signal worth taking seriously.
Therapy can help you understand where that feeling comes from, what is driving it, and what a different relationship with yourself and your family might actually look like. My work with immigrant and second-generation adults directly addresses the specific patterns that Riya’s story reflects.
What Culturally Informed Therapy Looks Like for Indian and South Asian Adults
Culturally competent therapy for South Asian adults is not just standard therapy with a few cultural references added. It is a fundamentally different starting point.
It begins with the assumption that your cultural context is not incidental to your mental health. It is central to it.
What That Means in Practice
- You do not have to explain your culture from scratch. I understand the dynamics of joint family expectations, the meaning of sacrifice in immigrant families, the particular pressure of being the first generation to succeed in a new country.
- Your family loyalty is honored, not pathologized. The goal is not to separate you from your family or your culture. It is to help you find yourself within those relationships rather than losing yourself to them.
- Generational patterns are treated as patterns, not diagnoses. The messages you absorbed in childhood, about endurance, about duty, about what you owe, are understood as inherited, not as evidence of something wrong with you personally.
- Both identity layers are taken seriously. Your Indian or South Asian identity and your American identity are both real. The tension between them is real. Therapy creates space to hold both without having to choose.
Practical Information: Starting Therapy in Chicago
If you are an Indian or South Asian professional in Chicago and you are considering therapy for the first time, here is what you need to know:
- Locations: Hyde Park office at 1525 E 53rd Street, Suite 433 (Friday 10 AM to 8 PM, Saturday 10 AM to 5 PM) and Loop office at 125 S Wacker Drive, Suite 308 (Monday through Friday, 10 AM to 8 PM, including lunch-hour appointments).
- Insurance: Blue Cross Blue Shield PPO, Aetna PPO, United Healthcare PPO, and Cigna PPO are all accepted. Self-pay sessions are $180 for 60 minutes.
- Online therapy: Available for clients throughout Illinois. Secure, confidential telehealth for anyone whose schedule or location makes in-person sessions difficult.
- First step: A free 15-minute consultation. No paperwork, no commitment. Just a brief conversation about where you are and whether working together makes sense.
- Languages: English, Bengali, and Hindi.
| You do not have to translate your experience for me. I understand where you are coming from, in more ways than one. |
When you are ready, I am here. Schedule your free consultation or call 312-607-4277.
Related Pages and Resources
Read more about services relevant to what Riya’s story describes:
Immigrant and Second Generation Therapy
Individual Therapy in Hyde Park Chicago
Anxiety and Depression Therapy
