Why I created Thriving Mind Clinic.
I have spent my career leading at the intersection of mental health, public health, and the systems that shape whether people are able to access care. But my journey began where I believe meaningful mental health work always begins: sitting across from another person and listening.
For nearly a decade, I worked as a frontline social worker in New York City, providing direct services to thousands of individuals and families. Coming out of graduate school, I knew that going where the people really are was the only way to learn. From an ER in the Bronx to a mobile unit during the peak of COVID-19, I witnessed the strength and resilience people carry. I also saw how often the systems designed to support us fall short, particularly for communities that have historically been least reached, heard, or served by them.
Eventually, I took what I had learned from those experiences into national leadership, with a goal of bringing the voices and experiences of the people I had served into conversations where they were too often absent.
As a leader, I have been fortunate to work across research, public health, and systems change to advance equitable approaches to health and well-being. My leadership career took flight as Director of the Kennedy-Satcher Center for Mental Health Equity at Morehouse School of Medicine, where I led national initiatives focused on improving access to mental health policies and services for historically under-reached populations. My work included helping advance an equity-centered approach to 9-8-8, the nation's first nationwide mental health crisis response system, as it launched in 2022.
But throughout those years, I kept returning to an idea I had written down nearly a decade earlier as a social work student:
Why does our healthcare system still shy away from the harmful ways our systems treat our identities?
I founded Thriving Mind because I believe therapy should be both deeply personal and deeply informed by the world in which we live. Our identities, cultures, relationships, communities, histories, and experiences with systems all shape how we experience our mental health. Effective care requires curiosity about that whole picture.
My professional journey has gifted me the privilege of working across many of those worlds: from direct clinical and community-based practice and academia to public health, policy, professional sports, entertainment, and national mental health initiatives. I have served as a subject matter expert, advisor, board director, educator, researcher, and advocate. Across all of those roles, one lesson has remained constant:
People are experts in their own lives.
That belief is at the heart of Thriving Mind.
As a clinician, I bring the perspective of someone who has sat on the other side of the therapy room. As a researcher and public health leader, I bring an understanding of the systems and research that shape mental health care. And as the queer daughter of South Asian immigrants, I carry my own understanding of how culture, family, identity, resilience, and stigma can shape our relationships with mental health and with systems of care. I grew up watching members of my own family struggle with mental illness and addiction, and repeatedly experience shame, stigma, and barriers to thriving. My ancestral history is my north star as a leader, but it is also just one part of a much larger story shared by countless families and communities.
Thriving Mind Clinic is my way of bringing what I have learned across these worlds into one place.
A place where you can be met with curiosity rather than assumptions.
Where your identity and lived experience are part of the treatment plan.
Where clinical expertise and humanity can coexist.
And where the goal is not simply to help you get through what brought you here, but to help you build a life in which you can truly thrive.
Welcome to Thriving Mind Clinic.
