Celebrating South Asian Heritage Month – 'Roots to Routes'

South Asian Heritage month: highlighting the importance of culturally competent psychotherapy  

South Asian Heritage Month (18 July – 17 August 2025) remains largely overlooked in the national conversation. Yet, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2021), over five million people in the UK identify as South Asian. This is the second largest ethnic group and yet it can be perceived to be invisible. This visibility gap matters – especially in the realm of mental health. Cultural silence, shame and stigma continue to shape how South Asian communities relate to emotional suffering and accessing mental health services for support (Prajapathi and Liebling, 2021). 

Cultural silence, inherited trauma 

Many British South Asians carry unspoken grief – from the partition of India to the quiet pressures of duty, honour and family sacrifice. Add a collectivistic culture of expectations and success-driven roles and you have a perfect recipe for hidden distress. Despite this, culturally sensitive, attuned therapy is still scarce. 

What can practitioners do? 

Therapists can make a difference by learning about the cultural frameworks their South Asian clients navigate from. This includes exploring how intergenerational and enmeshment trauma may present and being mindful of the internalised shame some clients carry around help-seeking. It’s important to listen for what’s not being spoken and to observe body language for what is being viscerally communicated. 

How psychotherapy can help 

Therapy offers South Asian clients a safe space to speak freely, without fear of dishonouring family or tradition. It allows individuals to name the experiences that they’ve spent decades hiding. When therapy respects culture, it becomes a site of liberation. This helps South Asian clients to acknowledge the three important A’s in therapy and how these help their mental health: 

• Awareness  
• Acceptance 
• Authentic communications 

Honouring the individuality of the South Asian psyche

The South Asian psyche is deeply individual, shaped by complex intersections of culture, migration, family and history. It cannot be easily generalised – and yet, many South Asian clients are misunderstood in their emotional processing by well-meaning practitioners. It is imperative that we offer a space that is empathic, safe and free of judgement. It’s okay not to fully understand a client’s cultural world. Sitting with the unknown of their culture mirrors their own experience of sitting with the unknown of therapy itself. Many non–South Asian practitioners struggle to be alongside their clients’ process, but deep, person-centred work doesn’t require certainty. It requires presence. To be truly person-centred is to sit with your own vulnerability as a therapist and honour your client as the expert of their own life (Rogers, 1951). 

Useful reads for therapists (written by Tina): 

• South Asians: The stigma around therapy is harming us
• Misconceptions about therapy in South Asian communities
• Why South Asians rely on medical doctors over therapists

References: 

• Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2021.
• Prajapati, R. and Liebling, H. (2021) ‘Accessing Mental Health Services: A Systematic Review and Meta-ethnography of the Experiences of South Asian Service Users in the UK,’ Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Springer Science and Business Media, p. 598. doi:10.1007/s40615-021-00993-x.
• Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centred therapy: Its current practice, implications and theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 

To find out more, you can visit the South Asian Heritage Trust's website.