Gracy: My Story

We are delighted to share this piece written by Gracy Andrew, one of our students who is close to completing her Diploma in Online Counselling and Psychotherapy at the Academy. This is Gracy's story:

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When I was young, I was always fascinated with people and their behaviour. If I had to take a bus I would choose to take a later one, just so that I could sit at the window and watch people at the bus stand. It was this fascination that made me decide that I should choose a career where I can work with people.

This was in the 1980’s and in my hometown in Goa, India, we neither had TV’s nor computers and the internet was not even heard of. I had to travel to another town and browse through books in the library to find the career options that were available. As I read about various professions, I just knew then that I wanted to become a psychologist much to the chagrin of my family who expected me to become a doctor. No body even knew what a psychologist was except that it was a profession that dealt with what most folks understood as “mad”.

I followed my dream… and had to leave my hometown and travel to Bombay to complete my post-graduation in Clinical Psychology. My first job was in a career guidance clinic and that’s when my work with young people began. Since then, most of my clinical work as well as research has been in the area of youth health.

In India, there is a lot of stigma attached to seeking mental health services. The first choice of families or individuals when faced with a mental health problem is to condemn fate and wait, when problems specially with severe mental disorders become difficult to handle, families will visit religious practitioners such as Shamans, Sadhus, bhagwans and baba’s (holy men).

Approaching a mental health professional is generally the last considered option. However, in recent years I have seen a change in lifestyles in urban cities. The affordable smart phone and internet usage that is available at one’s fingertips has transformed the social fabric of youth and with this there has been a greater demand for online help – help could be anything ranging from seeking numerologists, tarot card readers among others. Browsing through the net I found several online counselling services being advertised.

That’s when I became aware of the potential for developing online counselling services. Specially when the pandemic hit us, several face-to-face counsellors just shifted to online modes. With an already missing regulatory system to monitor practice of counsellors in my country what struck me is how easy it would be for untrained and unsupervised counsellors to provide services that can create more harm than good!

I decided to attend the course on online counselling and therapy at the academy so that I can learn how to set up a service that maintains high standards. I will continue gaining experience in online counselling this year and am hoping to start a more formal online counselling centre by next year. In the future I am hoping to be able to develop training programs tailored to the Indian context on online counselling so that we can have a well-trained cadre of online mental health counsellors in par with global standards!

The challenges that exist here is poor internet connectivity which limits how many locations one can reach out to. Other difficulties are lack of safeguarding facilities and poor awareness about the value of counselling. I would need to address these challenges by building awareness among clients, develop safeguarding parameters myself and limit my services at present to wherever there is availability of the internet. The course has provided me with the knowledge and the tutors have been incredibly supportive in helping me explore how to adapt the services to the context here. I hope in the future, with their support, I can build effective services to provide online counselling and therapy in India.

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