Your whole story is welcome here.
The family, the culture, the history. All of it welcome from the first session.
लीला
Why Leela
In Sanskrit, Leela — लीला — means divine play.The play of a life as it unfolds. Unscripted, unfinished, still being written.
The world as light, as play, as becoming. Not a problem handed to you. A story you are already inside of.
That is what we do here at Leela Mental Health. We read what has been written so far. Carefully. Together. And find where your next line wants to go.
Our Approach
Grounded in evidence.
Anchored in care.
Leela Mental Health is a group therapy practice in Palo Alto, CA, offering in-person and telehealth sessions across California. We specialize in anxiety, trauma, OCD, depression, ADHD, perinatal mental health, couples, and life transitions. Some things are hard to explain to a therapist who hasn’t lived anywhere near them. Leela was built for that.
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.
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.
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.
What people bring to Leela
Leela Mental Health works with adults, adolescents, and families across a broad range of concerns — these are 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
(Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an evidence-based treatment recognized by the APA, the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Leela uses it as a primary modality for trauma work — relational trauma, developmental trauma, single-incident events. Available in Palo Alto and via telehealth across California.
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
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.
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.
WHO THIS WAS BUILT FOR
People who have spent their lives navigating more than one world.
Leela was built for people whose full story — cultural, familial, generational — is part of the clinical picture from the first session. Many clients come having spent years in therapy that asked them to set that story aside. This practice does not.
South Asian clients
You came here. You built something. Your family sacrificed. You carry that.
You’ve been to therapy. The therapist was good. But every session — before the real thing — you had to explain. The family. The expectation. The guilt. The gap between who you were raised to be and who you are.
Leela already knows that context. You don’t have to explain it first.
Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali. South Asian therapist, Palo Alto CA and telehealth across California.
East Asian clients
Two ledgers. What you owe your family. What you actually want.
The cost of vulnerability. The math of sacrifice. The guilt of wanting something different.
Leela holds both. The work begins there.
Latine clients
Family is not background. It is the center.
The loyalty. The obligation. The love that comes bound to expectation. Leela works with all of it — without asking you to set it aside first.
Latine therapist, Bay Area CA and telehealth across California.
LGBTQ+ clients
Being who you are — inside a family or culture that has no language for it yet.
That navigation has weight. It doesn’t need to be simplified here. It can be held as-is.
LGBTQ-affirming therapy, Palo Alto CA.
OTHERS WHO FIND THEIR WAY HERE
Every story that has needed more space.
Tech workers and professionals — Burnout. Layoffs. Career transitions. The particular existential anxiety that has become structural in Bay Area work culture — the sense that you’ve built something impressive and it still doesn’t feel like enough.
Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers —Perfectionism, imposter experience, academic isolation. The strange loneliness of being surrounded by extremely accomplished people. Leela accepts selected Student Health Insurance Plans (SHIP), administered by Wellfleet Student. Currently we serve Stanford University Students with SHIP.
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. 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.”
Palo Alto. And across California.
Leela Mental Health’s office is at 220 California Ave, Suite 105, Palo Alto, CA 94306.
Telehealth is available throughout California: the Bay Area — San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale — as well as Los Angeles, San Diego, and across the state.
Therapy services are provided within California only, by licensed therapists and registered associates under licensed supervision.
Moitreyee Chowdhury
Moitreyee Chowdhury is a California-based Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) with a clinical background in community mental health, multicultural counseling, and South Asian mental health. Dual licensure at this level is uncommon. Before founding Leela, she supervised outpatient programs for low-income and immigrant families across the Bay Area and taught multicultural counseling at Palo Alto University as adjunct faculty. She grew up in India, trained in Fine Arts in Delhi and interned in stage design and puppet making in Frankfurt, Germany, and continues to work as a poet and visual artist. Her path is not incidental to the practice — it is the practice.
What clients ask most.
What kind of therapy does Leela Mental Health offer?
Leela Mental Health offers individual therapy for adults in Palo Alto and across California via telehealth. The practice has particular depth in trauma, anxiety, OCD, depression, ADHD, grief, perinatal mental health, and the weight of identity and cultural belonging — including the specific experience of navigating more than one culture, more than one set of expectations, more than one version of yourself.
Modalities are chosen for the person, not assigned in advance: 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.
Does Leela Mental Health work with South Asian clients?
Does Leela Mental Health work with East Asian clients?
Yes. Leela Mental Health works with East Asian clients across California — including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, and Southeast Asian communities.
What tends to bring East Asian clients here: the cost of vulnerability when composure has always been the expectation. Achievement that looks complete from the outside and feels unfinished from the inside. The gap between the self that was shaped by family and the self still finding its own outline. The particular exhaustion of being the one who holds it together — at work, at home, across two cultures.
None of that needs to be explained from the beginning. It is already part of how Leela listens.
Sessions are in English. If language access matters to you — Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Tagalog, or another language — mention it when you reach out. Leela is growing, and so is the team.
Does Leela Mental Health work with LGBTQ+ clients?
Yes. Leela Mental Health is LGBTQ+-affirming. The practice works with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, queer, and questioning clients — including those navigating identity within families or cultural communities that do not yet have language for who they are.
That navigation has a particular weight. The calculus of disclosure. What to say, to whom, and when. The grief of not being fully known by the people who love you. The exhaustion of managing two versions of yourself across different rooms.
That weight does not need to be simplified here. It can be held as-is — within a clinical frame that understands the intersection of queerness, culture, and family when all three are in the picture at once.
What if I've never done therapy before?
That’s common here. Many clients arrive at Leela Mental Health having never sat across from a therapist — sometimes because nothing ever felt urgent enough to warrant it, sometimes because therapy wasn’t something people in their family or community did.
You don’t need a crisis to start. You don’t need to have the right words yet, or know exactly what’s wrong. A first session is simply a conversation — about what’s been sitting with you, and whether this is the right fit. There’s no obligation after a consultation, and no expectation that you’ll have it figured out before you walk in.
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. We have clinicians at Leela Mental Health who 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?
Does Leela Mental Health accept insurance?
Leela Mental Health is an out-of-network provider and is not in-network with major insurance plans. Clients with PPO coverage may be eligible for partial reimbursement. What your plan covers, if anything, depends entirely on your specific benefits.
Two options to support out-of-network claims:
Superbill. Provided after each session at no additional cost. You submit it directly to your insurance carrier. What they reimburse, and whether they reimburse at all, will depend on your plan.
Thrizer. A third-party platform that can help navigate out-of-network claims. Thrizer charges its own fees, separate from therapy costs. Pricing and data privacy are discussed before you use it. An estimate tool is available below.
Reimbursement is never guaranteed. Actual amounts depend on your plan, deductible, coinsurance rate, and out-of-pocket maximum. Verify your out-of-network benefits directly with your carrier before your first session.
In-network options:
Lyra Health EAP. Leela is in-network with Lyra. Not all clinicians at the practice are currently covered. Confirm your specific benefits and eligible providers directly with Lyra before booking.
Student Health Insurance (SHIP). Leela accepts Wellfleet Student plans for Stanford University students. If you hold a different Wellfleet plan, contact us to confirm eligibility.
Leela Mental Health does not bill insurance directly on behalf of clients.
Does Leela Mental Health offer telehealth?
Yes. Leela Mental Health offers telehealth throughout California, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, and communities across the state. Sessions are available in English, Hindi, and Bengali.
Telehealth is provided within California only, by licensed California professionals and registered associates under licensed supervision.
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?
Under the No Surprises Act, healthcare providers must give uninsured and self-pay clients a written Good Faith Estimate of expected charges. At Leela Mental Health, this applies to clients paying out of pocket. It does not apply to clients using Lyra Health EAP or Cardinal Care benefits.
A Good Faith Estimate is provided in writing before your first session and outlines expected costs based on the services discussed. To request one, contact Leela Mental Health at information@leelamentalhealth.com or (650) 206-9448.
If your final bill is $400 or more above your Good Faith Estimate, you have the right to dispute the charge. For more information about your rights under the No Surprises Act, visit www.cms.gov/nosurprises or call 1-800-985-3059.
Begin
This is your scene. You get to write what comes next.
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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