I'm a psychologist. Therapy is still part of what I do, and it's where most of what I know about how people actually change comes from.
But the question I've spent the last several years on is bigger than any one session:
How do you build systems that actually reach people?
That's the work now, sitting between applied therapeutic practice and design, figuring out what makes mental health support usable, sustainable, and something people actually return to.
Also true about me: I drink too much coffee, dance, play tennis, and always have music on.
Curious about my journey?
Where it began
I started in mental health in India, working with individuals and families using creative arts, movement, and verbal counseling. That work taught me something important: the most skilled clinician cannot overcome a broken system outside the room. Stigma, fragmented access, processes not designed for real people, these weren't clinical problems. They were design problems.
How I learned to think differently
I went to the University of Michigan to study Design Science. Not to become a designer, to find a different way of thinking about the problems I kept seeing.
At Michigan I led UX research at MICHR, working on digital health tools, research pipelines, and feedback systems for Michigan Medicine. I was consistently the person who understood both the clinical and the design side. That intersection became my home.
What I noticed coming back
Returning to India, I noticed a gap. The tools that help organisations understand complexity, design thinking, systems inquiry, service design, were almost entirely absent from how mental health practices were built and run. Practitioners were doing extraordinary clinical work inside systems that were fragile and largely undesigned.
That's what Metaphor is built to address.
What I do today
I still sit with people in therapy. And I work with practitioners through Between Sessions, helping them find gaps in their practices and build something that actually holds.
I hold an MA in Clinical Psychology, a PG Diploma in Counseling Psychology, and an MS in Design Science from the University of Michigan. I am a certified Dance Movement Therapy and Visual Art Therapy facilitator.
If this resonates, whether you're looking for therapy or looking to build something better, I'd love to talk.