Working with South Asian Clients
Thursday, November 19, 2026 | 12:00 - 2:00 ET
90 minutes presentation - 30 minute question time
Presenter: Shivani Agarwal, MCP-AT
South Asian clients are one of the fastest-growing populations in Canadian mental health and addiction services, and one of the least likely to reach treatment early. When they do arrive, the predominantly Western clinical models we were trained in can work against us: individual autonomy as the goal, disclosure as progress, and family as background rather than the centre of the clinical picture.
This two-hour workshop offers a practical framework for working with clients of South Asian origin without flattening a vast and varied population into a single culture. We will spend significant time on relationship and family dynamics, including interdependence and collective decision-making, the position of the daughter-in-law, marriage and partner choice, financial interdependence, intergenerational conflict in immigrant families, caregiving obligation, and what happens clinically when a client's recovery threatens the family's standing in the community. We will also look at how shame, family honour and community visibility shape help-seeking and concealment; how substance use is normalised in some families and unspeakable in others, particularly for women; and how migration, racialisation and loss of professional status function as clinical material rather than background detail. All in all, how to develop autonomy and move away from enmeshment in a culturally-safe way.
This workshop is built around examples. We will work through a series of case vignettes and real clinical moments in large and small groups: the first session, the confidentiality conversation with a client who fears their community more than their counsellor, the family that arrives uninvited, the client whose distress presents in the body rather than in emotional vocabulary, and the treatment plan that collapses under family obligation. Participants are welcome to draw upon their own cases. Time is also set aside to examine our own assumptions and locations, including the particular questions faced by South Asian clinicians working with clients from their own communities.
CACFT/ACTCF members please login to register for free.
Non members: $50.00 plus tax
Refunds will not be provided after November 9, 2026.
A 10% administration fee will be charged for any refunds before that.
