Writing
Notes on counselling, emotional wellbeing and the things people actually arrive with. Written by Jiwanjyot Kour Puri, Counselling Psychologist and founder of Healora.
In India only one psychology title carries a statutory register: Clinical Psychologist. Psychologist, counselling psychologist, therapist and counsellor are not protected, so anyone can print them on a card. What RCI registration actually covers, how to verify a CRR number in two minutes, which kind of professional fits which concern, and the questions worth asking before you pay anybody.
ReadListed fees across the Tricity run from about ₹500 to ₹4,000 a session, which is too wide a range to be useful on its own. What sits behind the spread, how many sessions people actually need, what insurance and employer programmes do and do not cover, and our own rates written down rather than hidden behind a phone call.
ReadMohali, Chandigarh and Panchkula are close enough that distance is rarely the obstacle, so the choice turns on something else. Usually privacy: the clinic two streets from your mother's friend. On the waiting-room problem, the commute that quietly ends a course of therapy, and the cases where in person is genuinely the better choice.
ReadA chatbot is available at three in the morning, costs nothing, and will never make you feel slow for asking twice. It also cannot assess risk, and research published this year found that systems instructed to act as therapists routinely broke the basic ethical standards of the work. What these tools are reasonably good for, where they stop, and why agreement is not the same as help.
ReadDiwali falls on 8 November. For a lot of people the weeks around it are the hardest stretch of the year, and almost nobody says so while it is happening. On the pressures that actually make it difficult, the flat days afterwards, what helps, and how to tell festive low mood apart from something that needs more attention.
ReadHealora is an online counselling practice offering one-to-one sessions to clients in India and worldwide. Sessions run 50 to 60 minutes over secure video, and a free fifteen-minute introductory call is available if you would rather get a sense of it first.