Dr. Itisha Nagar Interview
Q. How has your journey as a student, a researcher, a professor, and a clinician shaped your understanding of psychology as a discipline so far?
I think you can see psychology from any angle. It's a very vast subject. At the end of the day, if we go to the technical part, we understand humans, human experiences, their thoughts, their behavior, their feelings, and the whys of it. Once we are done with understanding the knowledge, how do we apply it in any sphere?
To improve education, for example, once we understand how human beings think, experience, and feel, we can apply it in clinics where we can help individuals seek certain ends that they want to. Some people might be seeking to reduce distress; others might be seeking to go beyond just reducing distress, to go deeper and grow.
Apart from that, psychology's knowledge also helps you understand how communities and groups function, how systems operate, and what the relationship is between individuals and their systems. It doesn't matter where you're seeing it from; the idea is that you observe, you notice, and you get curious about human beings and their inner worlds.
Q. A lot of your work explores women's lives through different lenses, body image, neurodiversity, relationships. What drew you toward women as a primary subject of study?
My own experiences as a girl initially, of course, and then as a woman, drew me to women as a primary subject area. This is where I agree with a lot of feminists, including Kamla Bhasin, who said that you don't necessarily have to read books to become a feminist. That can enhance your understanding and learning, but your own life experiences bring you to feminism: the injustices, the bias, the discrimination.
For me, it's been how real women's realities are in terms of gender-related biases, opportunities, the gender gap in different areas, how the world is designed around gender, and a lot of other social constructs, including caste, class, and power differentials. It has always intrigued me how what is so real for me and how I experience the world is not seen by the world that way.
For example, something as common as experiencing sexual harassment or a lack of psychological and physical safety, to sort of move away from that reality because the power dynamics dictate that you have to submit to it, normalize it, or become desensitized to it, doesn't make sense to me. So I didn't have to do anything specific to arrive at women as a primary subject area. This is how I've experienced life. When I have used that lens to communicate my life and my world, people have called that research. I'm just speaking about how I experience life.
Q. As a clinician, is there a point where your everyday experience with trauma and what research claims start to disagree with each other, and if so, which do you trust in that moment?
Theories and everyday experiences very often conflict because theories about human beings are made in a certain context. Most of us have been taking the Western theoretical context and applying that to the Indian context since time immemorial. Other than that, we have been using the male gaze and the male lens, and then comes the angle of caste. When you are making any kind of theories, to what extent are these theories universal? There is the principle of universalism versus contextualism.
People don't have to fit into your theories. Your theories and your tools are supposed to be designed to work for people in a clinical context. I bring my world, my research, and my theories in as tools, but I will not start shaping people around my tools. The tools have to shape around people.
For instance, when I do my work in neurodiversity, autistic women or ADHD women, especially Indian or South Asian women, it looks very different from the understanding of autism or ADHD in general, which is based on boys and white men. I have published a paper on ADHD in Indian women. Take executive dysfunction, which involves higher-order cognitive functions used to manage life, including planning, time management, multitasking, and emotional regulation. Indian men are often only expected to manage their work, not domestic work.
Whereas for Indian women, it's typical that they have to manage their careers and domestic work. When women are not able to handle it, there is a lot more shame attached, as their identities revolve around taking care of their house. If they're messy, forgetting things, or disorganized, it becomes a shame on their personhood. You will find a lot of women being perfectionists, masking, and experiencing burnout in a way that may not show up in boys or men.
I use my theories to guide me, but not blind me. Science itself gives you skepticism toward its own theories. Anywhere there is rigidity when science comes in contact with human beings, that becomes non-scientific by the very defining characteristics of science, which are open-mindedness and skepticism. My personal understanding is that we do not sacrifice human beings at the altar of scientific theories.
Q. When you know the root cause of a client's trauma is really societal, not personal, how does that change how you treat them, and what do you think actually equips a person to stay mentally healthy in a society that keeps producing this kind of trauma?
First and foremost, understanding the limits of individualism and the potential of systemic violence on the individual psyche should be your framework. You can't just come from an individualistic framework; you have to have a bio-psycho-social-cultural-political framework.
Second, through my activism, I work with groups and communities through mental health education. At that level, I am trying to bring change within communities. For example, if I speak up on women's mental health and ask why we are shaming women for expressing anger when it is not abuse, I am addressing a systemic issue. Suppression of anger in women is strongly connected to developing autoimmune disorders.
When I advocate for values like diversity, social justice, and human dignity in a group setting, I'm doing my duty as a therapist in changing the world to whatever extent I can. When I work with clients individually, there is immense validation of the limits of our work, validating how the world has harmed and continues to harm them.
As a therapist, I can hold your pain and be that container, but I can't change systems and structures inside a therapy space. What I can do is work with you at a personal level to build human agency against the powerlessness that systems bring. We work on individual beliefs and holding space without blaming someone for why they can't do something when others can.
When working with someone from the Dalit community, for example, it requires deep empathy regarding how caste operates. Empowerment doesn't just come up on day one. It comes up when a person has been able to process a lot of pain stemming from intense powerlessness. If we don't have agency in the present day due to how systems are structured, we must avoid blaming the victim and expand our site of intervention to the community or policy level.
Q. What are the challenges you've faced working with and talking about issues that carry a lot of social stigma, given that mental health itself is already a taboo topic?
I haven't faced many challenges talking about taboo topics because I come from an authentic space. As an educator, when I connect to people's authenticity, they open up, share their experiences, and allow themselves to be vulnerable. When we approach these subjects from non-defensive spaces, the connection happens naturally.
The main challenge I experience is when there is domination or anonymity, especially in online spaces, where there is a threat or lack of safety. When I feel unsafe, I am unable to have authentic conversations. If I feel threatened, I protect myself rather than explore and create.
Educational spaces are supposed to be environments where people can disagree. However, when someone comes with the intention of suppressing or dominating rather than expressing discontent or disagreement, I find it challenging to navigate because that is not my job. When people come with an existing agenda where the conversation is seen as a threat and intentional violence is at play, it becomes incredibly unsafe and sad.
Q. What do you wish someone had told you when you were just starting out, that you had to learn the hard way instead?
I wish someone had told me that not all people are good, that there are unfortunately human beings who are irredeemable, and that darkness exists. When you are young or starting out, you are fed so much positivity and idealism. The limits of change at individual levels were not shown to me, which made me give a lot of benefit of the doubt to dark characters.
I wish there had been an older, wiser woman to influence me, someone the world might have seen as non-conforming, who would have told me not to give powerful, dominating men the benefit of the doubt all the time. We often mollycoddle powerful men. I wish I had known that sometimes people are beyond help, simply because they believe they don't need help or change. I shouldn't have carried hope for individuals who didn't want hope or help.
Q. What's a popular idea in mental health right now that you personally disagree with?
A popular idea in mental health right now that I personally disagree with is that a mental health professional who is popular is also the one who is effective. Being popular on social media or in public spaces does not make someone an effective practitioner or academician. In our space, an effective person is someone who has empathy, open-mindedness, and a non-judgmental stance. Popularity does not equate to effectiveness for the kind of work that psychology demands.
Q. Is there a version of yourself, from before you became a psychologist, that you think about often?
Of course, there is the version of me as a child. I often think about my sensitivity and vulnerability, and how I had to suppress those traits. Growing up with two sisters in Delhi-NCR, where levels of aggression and domination are high, being vulnerable or sensitive was not adaptive for survival.
I had to push down my sensitivity so I wouldn't be preyed upon. Now, I am old enough to integrate that part of myself back into my personhood. I am not just thinking about that version of me; I am actively bringing her back.
Bio
Dr. Itisha Nagar is a Delhi-based psychologist, feminist educator, and writer. She taught as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, for nearly a decade after completing her PhD, before shifting her focus toward writing and public engagement. Her research spans clinical and cognitive psychology, gender, and feminism, with published work covering ADHD in Indian women, autism, and social conformity. Beyond academia, she has delivered three TEDx talks and built a wide platform focused on trauma, healing, and womanhood.
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