Anushka Phal On Tailoring Wellbeing And Mental Health Services To Multicultural Australians

Anushka is a psychologist driving advocacy and change for minority communities across Australia. She is the founder of Umeed Psychology, a psychology private practice and social enterprise which aims to provide accessible, culturally informed mental health care.

She is a passionate advocate for youth mental health working as a school psychologist and also working as a published researcher in this space. Anushka is an Ambassador for the Australia New Zealand Mental Health Association & strives to make a global impact when it comes to mental health. She’s also the founder of The Shore Project, founding member of Guardians of The Pacific and a co-author for "Undefeated" a Professional Migrant Women project.

Anushka discusses how she is passionately driving advocacy and change for minority communities across Australia as well as her work and research in youth mental health.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in multicultural mental health?

[Anushka Phal] - This is always such a difficult question for me because it depends on what part of my background you are referring too. All of it is an amalgamation, and the way I like to introduce myself is that I am a New Zealand born Fijian-Indian who was raised in Australia. Obviously with that mixture, that little hot pot of culture, it was beautiful growing up bicultural. It's such a rich experience, but also a very confusing one. Why that's so important for me is it's led me to do the things I'm doing right now, because of all the various experiences I've had throughout life so far. I'm a psychologist, I run my own private practice, and I used to be a school psychologist as well. But now, I'm just focusing on my social enterprise Umeed.

Could you tell us a little bit about Umeed Psychology, why it exists and what you do?

Being bicultural, I moved to Australia in 2002. I was 8-9 years old, and when I first moved here, I distinctly remember my friends being so excited about ‘tea-time’. I thought it was cool everybody loves tea because I love drinking tea! Then I learnt that here ‘tea’ means dinner, and the reason I'm bringing this up is because it was such a bizarre little nuance for my little brain at the time. Because I'm Fijian Indian, for us tea at 5pm is masala chai with dipping biscuits. Tiny nuances like this keep coming up; I've been in this country for 19 years and still little things sometimes confuse me.

The difficulty of growing up bicultural is there are also big nuances you must navigate. You're navigating your collectivistic culture as well as your individualistic culture while growing up with both your parents’ expectations and community's expectations.

I was one of four brown kids in my school, you feel like you don't belong anywhere. As a result of that, naturally you end up going to therapy to try and find yourself. You have all these questions; you're having discussions and you're trying to put these nuances out there. But what I found as somebody in their teens and even my mid-twenties were that no one gets it. No one really understood what my perspective is; I must have been spending 6 of those 10 rebated sessions explaining my cultural background and why my problems are problems. As I started talking to people within my community, friends and family members, I realised this is a real problem. A lot of people aren't seeking support because they feel like they're not going to be understood, and that's where I come into the picture.

When I was studying to become a psychologist, my initial thought process was I wanted to work with young people, hence being a school psychologist and working with young people around youth mental health. As I progressed though, I started learning there's such a shortage in the multicultural mental health space. One day after work, I hopped on to southasiantherapist.org and signed myself up just in case anyone ever needs it. This idea didn't come out of having a business plan and creating a strategy around things. It was very I put my name up on this website, somebody called me, and I said, "give me a week to register my ABN.” I decided I can help one or two people after my day job. I was only trying to enter that space, and maybe in four- or five-years’ time, I wanted to start a big practice to see how it goes. But instead, it gained traction, it blew up over the last two years and we went from me just being a sole creator helping one or two people after my work at school to us having a whole private practice. We provided counselling, therapy, group therapy and consulting, but then we have two other programs. One is around mental health literacy so we can work on the stigma that appears in multicultural communities. The other side is around creating safe spaces, so we have a safe space program. One space is for domestic violence, another for South Asian women, and another for members of the LGBTQIA+ community. This is just to create places where people can come and connect to each other, so it starts the conversations about what these communities are experiencing and building up a social connection. Then they feed into each other, but that’s where it started and where it's ended up. The whole purpose was because I didn't want another generation of people to feel like they weren't heard, understood or safe when entering a therapy space,

There's clearly a need because of how rapidly you've grown, right?

It was the big surprise. Being in this space and meeting other like-minded people has been so amazing, because until I did it and we started growing, I didn't start meeting other people who also saw this as a problem. It's been beautiful to see you can be part of the community, because the area I'd grown up in and the way that I'd grown up, I wasn't seeing as many people who look like me or were experiencing what I was experiencing. It felt like a very lonely process. When I was in university, I remember thinking, "oh my God, am I going to have to do all of this work by myself?" You start doubting yourself by wondering whether this is a problem? This is also why I did my research and master's around intergenerational family conflict in Asian Australians.

As an advocate in the youth mental health space and researcher on student trauma, biculturalism, and intergenerational family conflict with Asian Australians, can you tell us more about your key findings?

I did two different research projects. The first one (which I published in my Honours year) focused on how we support school leadership in supporting students undergoing trauma. One of the key things to understand here is that for wellbeing to work well in a school, your leadership team must be on board and not just thinking, "we'll tick the box, we've got wellbeing. We're here to support the students!" They must have a good understanding of what mental health is and how the school system can support that structure? What the research focused on was doing interviews with principals and assistant principals to find out how much they know. What we learned was that it's not a lot, because in tertiary education you're not learning about mental health and its impacts. You're not learning how to pick up on it or understand how that impacts education. Any of the training a lot of these principals had been through was on their own accord, because schools rarely have the budget, and they rarely allocate time for it. My study was part of a broader study happening around schools. We looked at teachers, students, and wellbeing staff as well, and it was similar across the board. Unless you were from a wellbeing background or you had studied counselling, social work, or psychology, no one undergone the training. When you spoke to the students, they would talk about how certain teachers made them feel comfortable so they could open. Equally, they would also talk about how they would say something sometimes and no one noticed, or they didn't feel comfortable because they told one of their teachers about having anxiety and they brushed them off.

Increasing [mental health] literacy amongst educators is important because that provides better outcomes for kids. If we have healthier, happier kids that are mentally and physically healthier, you're going to have better academic outcomes. That's going to ultimately have ripple effects as they get older.

My interest in youth research came about because I studied resiliency when I was in my third year as a part of a bigger group cohort. Through that research, I found the lowest resiliency period is 18 to 25, and that's because that's when you're transitioning. That study didn't look at anyone younger, but if we had I would anticipate the ages would be 12 to 25, because that's where all your big life changes are happening. You've just begun navigating the world. When people say teenagers are being dramatic about stuff, they're allowed to be. Their world is as big as school, family, and friends, and that's all they know! Everything is happening for the first time and the world is constantly crashing down, but if you support and equip them with the tools, it doesn't mean they're not going to have problems later in life. It means that when they have problems, they've got the tools to deal with it, which means they're going to be more resilient as adults and have better outcomes. They're going to be more emotionally within that space and able to cope with things. That was the research down in the youth mental health space, and I think I'm still passionate about that. I would love to continue working in schools down the track. The reason I've taken a step back is to be able to work a little bit more on Umeed, to get that up and running by dedicating time to it. I'm super passionate about youth mental health; we're doing a series of events through Umeed for youth week because we received a grant this year. I'm excited about that; we're taking adopting a multicultural lens for this.

With my other research (my Masters, this hasn't been published yet), I have been talking to people who culturally have difficulty setting boundaries with their families, the migrant mentality around scarcity, and how we view work and conflict with our parents.

The lack of understanding between someone who's bicultural and someone who's a first-generation migrant create anxiety, stress and manifest in us. I questioned if these are issues or if I am just making it up? It was cool to do research in that space as well. It was an online survey and questionnaire because it happened during COVID-19, but we collected all this data and we'e able to see that yes, there are these core Asian values (because the target audience was Asian Australians) and when people move from a different country they choose to hold on to certain ones. These have an influence on the second generation and can create pressure depending on where your parents sit with things. For example, if your parents don't speak a lot of English and you had to be their translator for everything, you've had to grow up a little bit earlier. You could be eight years old on the phone to places like the tax office trying to figure things out. Even if you're coming from a family that can speak English and are skilled workers and, I know from my own personal experience I was the first person to go to university in this country. Navigating Year 11-12 and then university was so confusing. My parents didn't know what was going on, so I had to figure out all these little bits and pieces. That's the case for a lot of things, and then you start translating those things back to them and need to make sure you get it right for yourself so you can get it right for your younger siblings. It even comes down to what's culturally appropriate back home might not actually be the norms of the country you're living in. For example, I know for a lot of my clients have issues around autonomy, I guess what you would call a living life when you're a little bit younger. This includes going out and dating. Your expectations of values and the understanding around that is very different. Again, for different people this manifests in different ways, but it usually manifests in a way where there is a lot of anxiety, depression, and stress that's associated with it. That was interesting research, and I do go back and draw from that for the work we do at Umeed. There's some good research emerging in the future, and it was interesting because when I was doing that study, I found in Australia at the time there wasn't anything that had been done since maybe the two thousand or the nineties. It wasn't focused on specific demographics, and a lot of that literature came from America.

It's been an interesting journey, because 49% of Australians are either born overseas or have a parent born overseas, yet we didn't have a national multicultural mental health service that focuses on culturally responsive practice or research.

In the last four or five years, that's been increasing which is wonderful to see. I'm surrounded by fantastic people doing fantastic work, but we have such a long way to go and so many issues to cover. What I've learned is that mental health in Australia is quite naturally grounded in a Eurocentric lens. Things like culturally responsive practice takes a backseat. Unless you've been in that position, you don't understand why it's needed, and it's bizarre to me because we have specialised mental health care and support for so many different types of niches. For example, you're not going to be referring a military veteran to a child psychologist, so why are we referring people from multicultural backgrounds who have specific needs to people who are not understanding them or are skilled in that area?

As Co-Author of Undefeated with Professional Migrant Women, what were some of the challenges, opportunities, and insights that emerged from this collaborative process and community?

For anyone who hasn't checked out Professional Migrant Women (PMW), go and check out the incredible they're doing. Big shout out to Faviola for putting this book together, she's the founder of PMW. Sitting and having to decide what and how to write about my migrant journey was a challenge. I'm not going to lie; I had a bit of an existential crisis, because I questioned whether I am worth writing about. There comes a point where you realise you never actually sit down and reflect on your life. That was the first time I sat down and processed how far we'd come, what the migration process had been, all the things I'd been through and where I was right now. That was a challenge, because we're not used to sitting down and processing, we’re always on the go. It's always about starting or overcoming the next thing.

It was beautiful in the sense, because it was nice to be able to sit down, process and reflect; it was something that's taught me to do that more often. As a therapist I tell other people to reflect, but I rarely get the time to do it myself.

Opportunities wise, it was beautiful to meet these wonderful women who have had such incredible lives and who have pushed through so much adversity and displayed resilience. It's given me the opportunity to connect with people I probably wouldn't have otherwise known. I built some beautiful friendships, but as a part of it, we've been doing an Undefeated tour. We've been doing different events throughout the year, and we'll probably continue doing them. One of my favourite ones from this year (I do a lot of panel discussions and public talks and stuff) was at the Ivanhoe Cultural Hub. It was me and two of the other co-authors, and it was such a beautiful, organic conversation about our experiences. We were able to talk about those things, help other people relate back to it and feel seen and heard. It was such a beautiful experience, and if you haven't read the book yet I highly recommend it. I'm a little bit biased, but in the last couple of weeks I have had 3-4 people come up to me and say, "if you haven't already, you should read Undefeated!" It's good to hear that feedback from other people I don't know; they probably don't know my story is in there as well!

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently which you feel are creating a positive social change?

I don't even know where to begin. After are upcycling second-hand clothing. Go on their website and check them out; they recycle second-hand clothes and it's to combat the whole fast fashion industry by upcycling those into new materials which get sold back. ADIMH, the Australian Institute for Diversity and Mental Health is brand new. Their official launch is in October, and they are focusing on supporting different organisations and communities that by working within this multicultural mental health space. I would watch that space, that's a great way to get connected to other organisations. Allied Collective is doing fantastic work in terms of the social impact space. Shakti Melbourne is doing fantastic work within the mental health space specifically. There's a lot of fantastic organisations doing work in much needed areas. What I've noticed at least in the last year or so is I've connected with a lot of people filling gaps in the system. For example, with Internash, they collaborate with us on our Connect International program. They are providing support to people coming from overseas who need migration agents or resources. It's been so difficult for a lot of international students to find support and resourcing. Now, there's an organisation who does that. Stint Community is another one that's fantastic, they support international students as well. After you finish studying, they have this amazing online community where you can go and essentially receive support to find jobs. You also find support to make new friends and connect with people. They are collaborating with us on Connect International. AIDMH (this is in partnership with Solace), are doing fantastic work in multicultural mental health and connecting communities. I've met a lot of people on our advisory committee or who are working for me through Solace; I bet that the work through AIDMH is going to be even better than that. There are so many amazing organisations doing such fantastic work, it's worth keeping an eye out on this space because there is going to be a few things up and coming in the next year. We're very excited to hype everybody up and push that out there as well, to provide support where needed. I'm feeling super privileged to be around people and organisations like these.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

As a therapist, I would recommend Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown and The Alchemist if you haven't read it already. The Happiest Man on Earth is also a beautiful book. You should read The Resilience Project, and if you're in your twenties, The Defining Decade. Those are usually my recommendations when people ask, "how do I change my mindset?"