Depression therapy in the Bay Area for grief that has nowhere to go.
What Brings People Here
Depression is what it looks like
when grief has nowhere to go.
Presence & Absence
The mind that will not stop reviewing
It is 1 AM. You are replaying a work conversation from four days ago, cataloguing what you should have said, checking whether anyone noticed something you cannot name. The reviewing never produces a verdict. It just continues.
Withdrawal
Disappearing from relationships without meaning to
You don’t decide to pull away. It happens incrementally — a message you mean to reply to, a plan you mean to make. The people are still there. The reach required to actually be with them has become more than you have. You notice it. You don’t know how to stop it.
Exhaustion
Waking up tired
Not tired from doing too much. Tired from holding too much. You sleep, and wake up already behind. The heaviness is there before the day has asked anything of you. For many clients, this is the pattern that has been present the longest — and the one most easily explained away as just how things are.
Guilt & Shame
Carrying guilt about being low
You have things to be grateful for. You know this. You carry a list of reasons you should be fine. This makes it worse — the heaviness plus the guilt about the heaviness, proof, you tell yourself, that something is wrong with you rather than something is happening to you. It is not proof of that. Not at all.
Masking
Appearing fine while hollow inside
The performance is very good. The people who love you don’t see it. You have spent so many years making sure they don’t that the mask has become load-bearing — you’re not sure what would happen if you put it down. This is not weakness. This is what happens when feeling was never fully safe.
Somatisation
The body carrying what can’t be named
It arrives in your chest before your thoughts catch up. Headaches with no clear origin. A heaviness that sleep doesn’t touch. For many clients — particularly those from communities where emotional distress has no permitted language — the body becomes the place where what cannot be said gets stored. Leela Mental Health holds this, too.
The Team
The people you’d be working with.
Moitreyee Chowdhury
Couples · Individual · Family · Trauma
Moitreyee founded Leela because the practices available to South Asian and immigrant couples in the Bay Area kept asking people to explain themselves first. Her couples work is integrative — CBT, DBT, Family Systems, trauma-focused — but the work always starts from what each person brought in before they met. She trained in fine arts in Delhi, worked in stage design and puppetry in Germany, and has practiced in California for over two decades. A published poet. Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali.
Therapist Name
Couples · Individual · Multicultural Families
Bio to be added. This clinician works with couples and individuals, with particular attention to East Asian and immigrant families navigating relational stress. Trauma-informed. Available in English and [language TBD].
Therapist Name
Couples · Young Adults · Life Transitions
Bio to be added. This clinician works with couples and young adults, with a focus on life transitions and the particular pressures of growing up between two cultures. CBT and DBT. Supervised by Moitreyee Chowdhury, LMFT #121934. Available in English and [language TBD].
You don’t need to have the words before you make the call.
Clinical Methods
Evidence-based approaches,
chosen for the person.
CBT
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) examines the relationship between thought patterns and the low mood they sustain. For clients with persistent self-criticism, guilt that has no specific object, or the conviction that feeling low reflects a personal failing, CBT makes the loop visible. Once the pattern can be named, it can be interrupted. At Leela Mental Health, CBT is adapted to work alongside a client’s cultural values — not in opposition to them.
DBT
Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers specific, practicable skills for the moments when depression is largest — when the emotion has occupied so much space there is no room for anything else. At Leela, DBT addresses a particular tension many clients know: the gap between the culturally expected response and the emotionally honest one. The skills give you more room to move inside your own life, not outside your values.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is used at Leela Mental Health for depression that has a history — early loss, immigration, relational ruptures, childhood experiences of not being enough, grief that was minimized by the family or by circumstance. When depression is rooted in experiences that were never fully processed, EMDR works at the level where those experiences are stored, not just discussed. Moitreyee Chowdhury is EMDR Trained.
Family Systems
Family Systems Work
For many clients, the depression is not only individual — it lives in inherited roles, in the rule that need is not permitted, in the pattern of being the strong one so that no one else has to be. Family Systems work at Leela Mental Health makes those structures visible without blame. The goal is not to reject the family. It is to understand what was assigned, so the client can decide — consciously, not by default — what to carry forward.
Depression does not arrive the same way in every family.
Leela Mental Health was built from the inside of the experience South Asian, East Asian, and immigrant clients bring. There is no intake session spent explaining the framework. The four patterns below are ones Moitreyee Chowdhury holds before you arrive.
Masking — appearing fine while hollow inside
The performance of fine is not vanity. It is often survival. In many South Asian and East Asian families, the display of need carries real cost — social, familial, professional. The result is a very capable exterior and an interior that has been running on empty for years. Leela Mental Health does not require you to perform wellness. You can arrive with the mask still on. We’ll work from there.
OCD
Somatisation — the body carries what can’t be named
In communities where emotional distress has limited permitted language, the body often becomes the designated carrier. Chronic headaches, digestive problems, unexplained fatigue, tension with no clear origin. Leela Mental Health approaches these not as separate from the depression but as part of it — the body’s version of the same story. EMDR and somatic awareness are part of the clinical work here.
Anxiety & Depression
Duty before self — depression read as ingratitude
Many clients were raised in cultures that defined personhood through contribution to the family. Feeling low is, in this frame, a failure of gratitude — a betrayal of the sacrifices that brought the family here. The guilt of depression on top of the depression itself is one of the heaviest things clients carry into first sessions at Leela. It is not proof of ingratitude. It is proof of how long this has been going on without support.
Emotion Regulation
The shame of naming it — first-gen and immigrant families
For first-generation clients and the children of immigrants, reaching out for depression therapy can feel like confirming a fear — that you couldn’t carry what you were supposed to carry. Leela Mental Health was built for this specific weight. Seeking support is not a sign that something went wrong. It is often the first honest thing a person has done for themselves in years. The Bay Area office is here. The telehealth option is here. You don’t have to explain why it took this long.
Who Comes to Leela
Depression at different
chapters of life.
The professional carrying visible success and private weight
Leela Mental Health works with adults who deliver, who perform, who hold it together — and who have begun to understand that holding it together is not the same as being okay. Clients come from San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Mountain View, Menlo Park, and in person to the Palo Alto office.
The teen for whom achievement and low have become the same story
Leela Mental Health offers depression therapy for teens in Palo Alto in person and via telehealth throughout California. The approach is adapted to where a young person actually is — not where adults expect them to be. Parents can reach out directly to discuss whether this is the right fit.
What people ask before reaching out.
What does depression look like in South Asian and immigrant communities?
Is depression therapy at Leela available across the Bay Area?
How does Leela approach depression differently?
Can EMDR be used for depression?
Do you offer depression therapy for teens in the Bay Area?
Do you offer therapy in Hindi or Bengali for depression?
How do I get started with depression therapy?
Good Faith Estimate: If you are paying out of pocket or not using insurance, you have the right to a written Good Faith Estimate before your first session. Read the full notice ➞
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