Poornima Ujwal

Poornima Ujwal—counseling psychologist and founder of Help Clinic—carries a rare duality in her work: the precision of a clinician who trained at NIMHANS and AIIMS, and the hard-won wisdom of someone who once navigated India’s mental healthcare maze as a struggling teen. Over six years and 1,500+ clients across generations, she’s built a practice that honors both sides of this coin, blending evidence-based therapies with the cultural fluency often missing in mental health spaces.

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Her journey began with personal fractures—childhood sensitivity giving way to depression, anxiety, and frustrating encounters with a system that reduced mental health to either clinical labels or whispered stigma. What might have broken others became her blueprint: today, Help Clinic embodies everything she needed then—a space where CBT coexists with Vipassana insights, where addiction counseling (her specialty, honed at CAM and India’s first addiction conference) considers both neurochemistry and societal shame.

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Poornima’s toolkit reflects this synthesis. Sessions might weave Polyvagal Theory exercises with yoga-based somatic work; psychometric assessments flow into discussions about ghee’s impact on cognitive function. Whether addressing screen addiction in teens or fertility-related trauma in adults, her approach remains rooted in existential-humanistic principles—believing lasting healing requires addressing the whole person: their trauma history, cultural context, dietary habits, and even career pressures (all areas covered by her diagnostic specializations).

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Beyond individual therapy, she’s driven by prevention—designing workshops that demystify the gut-brain connection, writing about Indian psychology’s relevance to modern anxiety, and most importantly, ensuring no one faces the isolation she once did. Help Clinic isn’t just a practice but a corrective experience: proof that mental healthcare can be rigorous yet soulful, clinical yet compassionate, and above all, unwaveringly human.