About Our Team
Our team includes clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, therapists, career and school counselors, relationship and family therapists, and art therapists — all vetted, licensed, and experienced.
Our therapists are trained across a range of evidence-based modalities, including:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Trauma-informed care
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Hypnotherapy and Dream work
- Transactional Analysis
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)
We keep individual therapist profiles private. If you'd like to know more about the person you've been matched with, just ask and we'll share their background with you.
You can read more about our services here.
From individual therapy and couples counseling to career guidance and child psychology.
If you would like to know more about our founder and the PsychLine story, here it is.
Dr. Niharika Thakkar
Niharika is an insightful, creative, and restlessly ambitious individual, with a rabid social conscience. She ardently believes that mental health awareness is necessitated in the world right now, particularly more so in countries like India, where the insatiable demand of our population for mental health care is woefully underserved.
Niharika is an insightful, creative, and restlessly ambitious individual, with a rabid social conscience. She ardently believes that mental health awareness is necessitated in the world right now, particularly more so in countries like India, where the insatiable demand of our population for mental health care is woefully underserved.
Niharika has a Bachelors’s and Masters’s in Clinical Psychology from Fergusson College, University of Pune. At college, she excelled in academics and shined through when she was awarded the “most deserving candidate of the year” scholarship in her final year in 2011. After completing her post-graduation, she worked as a counselor for over 4 years, where her work presented her with the opportunity to work with a gamut of people and leverage her knowledge of the field in variegated domains including testing and diagnosis, child & adult therapy, and rehabilitation.
“Working as a psychotherapist helped me understand myself better, gain insight and self-awareness, but more importantly, I found my passion and my purpose.”
Her experience working with end clients not only confirmed her interest and aptitude in the field of Psychology, but also it was the opportunity to understand and reflect human emotions, feelings, and sentiments that she came to value the most!
In 2012, she cleared her National Eligibility Test by the University Grants Commission of India for Ph.D. and lectureship, which prompted her to start working towards a more ambitious degree, a doctorate. After gaining gratifying work experience in India, Niharika was accepted as a Ph.D. scholar in 2014 at the prestigious Leiden University, Netherlands, an institution that prides itself with names like Albert Einstein and Rembrandt on its alumni list. She received a full grant to pursue her Ph.D. in the field of “Bullying and Victimization in junior high schools; the role of students’ characteristics, teacher’s attitude and socio-demographic contexts in school”.
Niharika has now completed her Ph.D. and works as the Director of Global Health and Education at the Hsopital for Special Surgery at Cornell Medical in New York. She also dedicates all her free time and energy towards PsychLine.in that she considers to be her mission. She has also worked as a Psychology teacher and school counselor and has several international publications to her name.
She has been an avid Chess player since childhood and is a hopeless dog lover. However, if there is one thing for which she would leave everything else in the world behind, it would be surfing!
The PsychLine Story
The seeds for PsychLine.in were sown early in 2013, when a fresh-off-the-boat girl, in all her naivety and impassioned fire, recognized that there is not enough being done to serve the purely basic statistical incidence rates of mental health struggles in India. Given the colossal population size of India, coupled with India's regional diversity and cultural uniqueness, she realized that mental health needs of majority of the country is going unserved. With this youthful wisdom, some education and an earnest experience by her side, a very righteous and ambitious woman, Niharika Thakkar, set up an initiative called PsychLine.in in Indore, India.
She gradually built her clientele working together in collaboration with psychiatrists, hospitals, schools, and rehabilitation centres for a couple of years. Her network of well-wishers and experts persistently guided and inspired her to keep it going on a daily basis. By the end of 2013, Niharika had worked at a de-addiction and rehabilitation center, had two on-going clinics, and was a consultant therapist at some of the most prestigious hospitals of Indore. She also worked as a Psychology teacher at a school. Meanwhile, PsychLine.in was growing fast within her community when an opportunity presented itself to broaden her horizons in the field of Social and Behavioral Sciences — she was offered a grant to complete her PhD through Leiden University, Netherlands.
Upon starting her PhD in 2014, PsychLine.in took a back seat in Niharika's life, and she moved to New York by 2015 with her husband. PsychLine.in and the ambition to start an organization for mental health care in India were often in her thoughts over the years, but surfaced passionately to the forefront again when the pandemic hit globally. Many of her old clients were reaching out to her once again, and the stresses of the lockdowns in India could be realized in every conversation. So in June of 2020, she went back to her original purpose and reinitiated PsychLine.in.
Our mission
PsychLine.in aims to provide quality mental health services through affordable, technologically accessible, and practical solutions, to anyone struggling with stress, emotional disturbances, behavioural problems or mental health difficulties. Our efforts focus on making available a user-friendly online platform, in collaboration with a team of skilled therapists and experts to reach out to the grassroots of India, offering professional mental health care for all.
Our vision
Our vision is to be able to meet every individual's need in India with good quality mental health support. In our society, many people may want therapy but the stigma and prejudice surrounding mental healthcare stops them from booking an appointment. Others may need care but have no options that are convenient or accessible. We focus on bringing global standards of evidence-based research together with an Indian perspective:
- Spread awareness about mental healthcare to erase the stigma around it, and welcome everyone to explore counseling as an option.
- Make good quality counseling available so anyone can reach out for care any time, anywhere, through an online platform in India.
- Train the next generation of mental health professionals in India through courses, webinars, workshops, and internships.