OUR ETHOS
Our practices are informed by:
- Relational
recognizing that people are shaped through relationships and social worlds and make sense of their experience in relation to one another.
- Gently Curious
staying open to the multiplicities of our being, to the complexity and uncertainty that may unsettle what we think we know.
- Without appropriation
not claiming to represent experiences or voices that are not ours to represent.
- With accountability
making space for feedback, debriefing, reflection, reparation, and change.
- Slow and intentional
resisting extractive models of productivity, care, and knowledge-making.
- Political
recognizing that psychological life cannot be separated from caste, gender, sexuality, class, disability, institutions, histories, and power.
- Experiential
allowing room for play, uncertainty, creativity, and forms of practice that do not fit neatly into existing categories.
- Collectively
treating knowledge and care as things that can be created with one another, rather than delivered to others.
The Inbetween Space aims to have:
We aim to name and dismantle carceral logic—surveillance, risk assessment, pathologisation, and coercive compliance—that has extended well past prisons into mental health care itself.
Abolitionist practice means building non-violent own and communal alternatives.
What that will look like with us:
alternative crisis response; no automatic police involvement
no diagnosis used as a gatekeeping tool for who "deserves" care
repair conversation instead of exile when rupture and harm occur
naming position of power even if space rejects hierarchy
We aim to acknowledge the impact of capitalism on learning, research and practice of mental health care. Capitalism's competitive market, underpayment, and commercialisation of internships and practice have constantly exploited psychologists and clients as means to make profit by businesses. It has also impacted who gets access to what.
What that will look like with us:
de-individualising distress, exhaustion and isolation
avoid productivity norms by moving away from ‘compliance’ and ‘efficiency’
no metrics and evaluation to assess
no profit motive; non-competing
no extraction of (trainee) psychologists with unpaid labour
challenge internalised capitalist values
We aim to have an anticaste practice, a growing body of India-based scholarship and practice, which argues mainstream psychology needs active decolonisation because it lacks space for conversation and reflection of caste-based suffering and that therapists' own caste positioning is clinically relevant, not neutral.
What that will look like with us:
anti-caste positioning by therapists
knowledge of caste and its impact
reflexivity and awareness of the practitioner’s caste location
Ignacio Martín-Baró argued that psychological distress is not primarily an individual, internal malfunction but a manifestation of oppressive social and historical relationships—and that psychology practiced without confronting those relationships is itself a political act, just a silent one. We aim to practise conscientización: the fostering of critical consciousness as a therapeutic and political process, rather than treating it as a side effect of therapy.
We ask:
What has happened around them, what conditions are they living within, and what have they had to become in order to survive those conditions?
It means making room for the possibility that what has been named as an individual deficit may also be an intelligible response to a relational, social, economic, cultural, or political reality.
What that will look like with us:
Context becomes clinically relevant; it becomes part of how we understand distress, relationships, identity, and possibility.
We examine the conditions around a problem, not only the person experiencing it.
We hope to co-curate rooms to question dominant explanations; examining what particular explanations illuminate, what they obscure, and whose interests they may serve.
We attend to social messages becoming lived psychological realities and how they might be questioned.
We distinguish adaptation from pathology; what a response has made possible, what it has cost, and whether something different has become possible now.
We work towards critical consciousness rather than prescribed political consciousness; growing curious about forces shaping the larger tapestry of our lives, and develop possibilities for action, imagine together.
We do not require political disclosure or agreement; make more possibilities for thinking available, not to replace one imposed explanation with another.
“Neuroqueer” (Nick Walker) is the idea that the rules for how a “normal” mind or body should look and behave, and the rules for how gender and sexuality should look, come from the same place and that pushing back on one usually means pushing back on the other too. It resists neuronormativity and cisheteronormativity.
What that will look like with us:
no single “correct” way to show up in a session
no expectation of eye contact, stillness, a certain tone of voice, or a certain pace of speaking
names and pronouns get asked once, are respected always, and are never treated as a special request
session structure is for holding and is offered, not enforced
rejects pathology paradigms but acknowledges medical intervention.
Feedback and reflexivity aren't only collected from complaints. We will keep coming back to reflect and continue to add more to our ethos of mental health practice!