Palo Alto, California · Telehealth Across California

Some things are easier to carry when someone else can finally see them.

Leela Mental Health is a therapy practice in Palo Alto, California. We work with anxiety, trauma, OCD, depression, ADHD, grief, and the particular pressures of lives built across cultures. Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali — in person and across California.

Book a Free Consultation

(650) 206-9448

EMDR Trained . ERP for OCD. CBT & DBT. LMFT · LPCC. English · Hindi · Bengali . In-Person & Telehealth CA

लीला

Why Leela

In Sanskrit, Leela — लीला — means divine play: not play as trivial, but as the unscripted unfolding of a life. A story in the writing, not a problem to be solved.

Leela Mental Health takes its name from that word. What we do in therapy is the slower work of understanding what has been written so far — and what might come next.

Our Approach

Clinically grounded. Humanly present.

Leela Mental Health was built on one conviction: that good therapy depends on the therapist genuinely understanding the world the client lives in — not as a category, but as a life.

People bring different things here: anxiety, trauma, depression, grief, OCD, ADHD, relationship patterns, perinatal and reproductive concerns, identity questions, and the particular exhaustion of lives that look fine from the outside. The range is wide. What holds it together is the quality of attention each person receives.

01

Clinically Rigorous

Every modality at Leela has an evidence base. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), Family Systems — tested methods, applied with intention and adapted to each person.

02

Every Life Arrives in Context

Leela Mental Health listens within a full frame — the family system, the cultural background, the migration story, the professional pressure, the gap between who someone was raised to be and who they are becoming. That context is central. It is where the work begins. Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali.

03

Care That Extends Beyond the Hour

Leela works alongside psychiatrists, school counselors, doctors, and families — because a person’s life extends well beyond the therapy room. This practice coordinates care across all the systems that shape a client’s wellbeing. Whole-person, collaborative care is how Leela works.

Areas of Focus

What people bring to Leela

Leela Mental Health works with adults across a broad range of concerns. These are the concerns clients most often bring to Leela Mental Health — and the areas where this practice has particular depth.

Anxiety

Anxiety & Burnout

High-functioning anxiety — the kind that coexists with a full calendar and a composed exterior. Bay Area and tech culture have their own specific shape of this. CBT and DBT are primary tools, alongside careful attention to what the anxiety is actually organized around.

Trauma

Trauma & EMDR

Leela Mental Health offers Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) as a primary modality for trauma work — recognized by the APA and WHO, effective for relational trauma, developmental trauma, and single-incident events.

OCD

OCD, ERP & Intrusive Thoughts

Leela Mental Health offers Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), an evidence-based treatment for OCD. ERP works by supportively helping clients face feared thoughts while building the capacity to resist compulsive responses. Also offered for perinatal OCD and postpartum intrusive thoughts.

Depression

Depression & Low Mood

Depression rarely arrives as the textbook version — more often it looks like flatness, disconnection, or a fading sense of meaning. Leela works carefully with the particular shape depression takes in each person’s life, using CBT, EMDR, and relational approaches.

Fertility & Perinatal

Fertility, Perinatal & Reproductive Mental Health

The emotional weight of IVF, pregnancy loss, postpartum depression, and perinatal anxiety is rarely isolated. Leela Mental Health holds this work within a full clinical frame that accounts for relationship strain, anxiety, OCD, and the cultural dimensions of fertility and family-building.

Identity

Identity, Culture & Belonging

The particular work of building a self when two cultures have each claimed some of your shape — and neither has claimed all of it. First-generation and 1.5-generation experience. Immigration. The distance between who you were raised to be and who you are becoming.

Relationships

Relationships & Family Patterns

The stories that run in families across generations — how closeness is performed, how conflict is managed, how love and expectation are allowed to look similar. Couples work, family systems, and the quieter work of understanding what you learned about relationships.

ADHD

ADHD in adults is often undiagnosed — particularly in women, and in communities where high achievement has historically masked its presence. Leela Mental Health works with ADHD within the context of a person’s full life: the systems that help, the relationships it affects, the identity questions it raises.

Modalities

Methods with evidence behind them.

Leela Mental Health uses clinically validated approaches selected based on each client’s history, presenting concerns, and goals. Modalities are tools — adapted to the person in the room.

Trauma

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

A structured, evidence-based therapy recognized by the American Psychological Association, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. EMDR helps the brain reprocess experiences encoded under duress — allowing them to integrate rather than repeatedly activate.

OCD

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)

The evidence-based treatment of choice for obsessive-compulsive disorder, recognized by the International OCD Foundation. ERP works by supportively helping clients face feared thoughts while building the capacity to resist compulsive responses — reducing OCD’s hold over daily life over time. Available for OCD including perinatal OCD and postpartum intrusive thoughts.

Anxiety & Depression

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

One of the most extensively researched forms of psychotherapy, with a strong evidence base across anxiety, depression, and OCD. At Leela Mental Health, CBT is applied with attention to cultural context — recognizing that thought patterns emerge within families, communities, and histories.

Emotion Regulation

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

Structured skills in distress tolerance, emotional regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness — drawn from one of the most robust evidence bases in clinical psychology. DBT is integrated at Leela where clinically indicated, particularly for clients working with intense emotional states or relational patterns.

Relationships

Family Systems Therapy

Understands each person’s behavior within the context of the relationships and dynamics that shaped it. Particularly valuable for clients whose concerns are inseparable from family relationships — including intergenerational patterns, migration and acculturation dynamics, and the negotiations between individual autonomy and collective belonging.

Coordination

Collaborative & Systemic Care

Leela works alongside psychiatrists, school counselors, doctors, and families where that collaboration serves the client. Therapy does not exist apart from the full arc of a person’s life — and this practice is built to coordinate care across all the systems that shape wellbeing.

Communities

People who have spent their lives navigating more than one world.

Leela Mental Health was built for clients whose full story — cultural, familial, generational — is part of the clinical picture from the first session. Many clients come to Leela having spent years in therapy that asked them to set that story aside. This practice does not.

South Asian clients will find a practice that understands the specific architecture of South Asian family life: the weight of intergenerational expectation, the pressure of achievement performed for the family as much as for oneself, the privateness of emotional difficulty, the cultural dimensions of marriage and fertility, the distance between the self that was shaped at home and the self that has been built here.

East Asian clients searching for a therapist who understands the pressure of family expectation, the cost of not showing vulnerability, the gap between what was sacrificed to get here and what you actually want from your own life — will find a welcoming and attentive practice at Leela Mental Health.

Leela Mental Health is an LGBTQ-affirming practice. This includes clients navigating identity within cultural or family contexts where that navigation carries additional complexity — where being who you are happens against a backdrop of community expectation, generational silence, or immigration. Sessions available in English, Hindi, and Bengali.

Also Served

Every story that has needed more space.

Tech workers and professionals — burnout, career transitions, layoffs, and the particular existential anxiety that has become part of Bay Area work culture.

Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers — including those covered by Cardinal Care (administered by Wellfleet Student), Stanford’s student health insurance plan. Perfectionism, imposter experience, academic isolation.

Couples and partners — communication patterns, cultural differences in conflict and closeness, trust, and distance. Intercultural and interfaith couples navigating family systems that pull in different directions.

Adults in life transitions— immigration, career change, parenthood, relationship endings, grief, and the quiet disorientation of a life that has changed faster than the self has caught up.

Clients of all backgrounds, cultures, genders, and identities are welcome at Leela Mental Health.

“Therapy in a language that holds the whole of who you are — not just the English-language version.”

Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali

Find Us

Palo Alto. And across California.

Leela Mental Health’s office is located at 220 California Ave, Suite 105, Palo Alto, CA 94306 — a quiet, private space in downtown Palo Alto. In-person sessions are available for clients who prefer to meet face to face.

Telehealth sessions are available to clients throughout California: the Bay Area — San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and surrounding communities — as well as Los Angeles, San Diego, and across the state.

Therapy services are provided within California only, by licensed California professionals.

Book a Consultation

(650) 206-9448

Founded By

Moitreyee Chowdhury

LMFT #121934 · LPCC #9238 · EMDR Trained

Leela Mental Health was founded by Moitreyee Chowdhury, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor practicing in California. Moitreyee is a member of CAMFT, a past board member of the Silicon Valley Chapter of CAMFT (SCV CAMFT), and a past adjunct professor at Palo Alto University. She is a speaker on culturally informed mental health in South Asian communities.

Questions

What clients ask most.

Leela Mental Health responds to every inquiry within 48 hours. No commitment required for a consultation.

Book a Free Consultation

(650) 206-9448

What kind of therapy does Leela Mental Health offer?

Leela Mental Health offers individual therapy for adults, with particular depth in trauma, anxiety, OCD, depression, ADHD, grief, perinatal mental health, and identity and cultural belonging. The practice uses evidence-based modalities: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), and Family Systems Therapy. Sessions are available in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Leela Mental Health is located in Palo Alto, California, and serves clients statewide via telehealth.

Does Leela Mental Health work with South Asian clients?

Yes. Leela Mental Health was built with particular care for South Asian, East Asian, and immigrant clients — people for whom mainstream therapy has often felt culturally misaligned. The practice understands the specific dynamics of South Asian family systems: intergenerational expectation, the pressures of acculturation, the cultural dimensions of achievement, marriage, and mental health. Sessions are available in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Clients do not need to explain their cultural context before the work can begin — that context is already part of how Leela Mental Health listens.

Is EMDR therapy available at Leela Mental Health?

Yes. Leela Mental Health offers Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) as a primary modality for trauma work. EMDR is an evidence-based therapy recognized by the American Psychological Association, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, developed to help the brain integrate experiences that were encoded under distress. Clinicians at Leela Mental Health are EMDR Trained. Sessions are available in person in Palo Alto and via telehealth across California.

Is ERP therapy for OCD available at Leela Mental Health?

Yes. Leela Mental Health offers Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), an evidence-based treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder recognized by the International OCD Foundation. ERP works by supportively helping clients face feared thoughts or situations while building the capacity to resist compulsive responses over time. ERP is available for OCD including perinatal OCD, intrusive thoughts in pregnancy, and postpartum OCD. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is used alongside ERP where clinically indicated. Sessions are available in Palo Alto and via telehealth throughout California.

Does Leela Mental Health accept insurance?

Leela Mental Health is an out-of-network provider for most private insurance plans. Clients with out-of-network PPO benefits may submit a superbill for potential reimbursement — the practice provides documentation to support this process. Leela Mental Health is in-network with Lyra Health EAP, which provides access to sessions at little or no cost depending on benefit tier. Cardinal Care, administered by Wellfleet Student — Stanford’s student health insurance plan — is also accepted. Clients are encouraged to verify their specific benefits directly with their insurance carrier. Leela Mental Health does not bill insurance directly on behalf of clients.

Does Leela Mental Health offer telehealth?

Yes. Leela Mental Health offers telehealth sessions throughout California. Telehealth is available to clients in the Bay Area — San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and surrounding communities — as well as Southern California, including Los Angeles, San Diego, and Irvine, and elsewhere across the state. Sessions are available in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Telehealth services are provided within California only, by licensed California professionals. In-person sessions are available at 220 California Ave, Suite 105, Palo Alto, CA 94306.

What is the Good Faith Estimate and does it apply to me?

The No Surprises Act requires healthcare providers to offer a Good Faith Estimate of expected costs to clients who are uninsured or who choose to pay out of pocket rather than using insurance. At Leela Mental Health, this applies to self-pay and uninsured clients only — it does not apply to clients using EAP benefits through Lyra Health or coverage through Cardinal Care. A Good Faith Estimate gives you a clear understanding of expected charges before your first session. To request one, contact Leela Mental Health at information@leelamentalhealth.com or (650) 206-9448.

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