From There To Here
Niharika Hiremath · 53 min
A South Indian-Australian mental health professional draws on her own lived experience as a third culture kid to argue that identity and mental well-being are inseparable — and that Australia's services must catch up.
Niharika Hiremath spent her first seven years in South India with her grandparents while her parents worked in another city. When her father decided the family needed to be together, they moved to New Zealand and then Australia, seeking the chance to watch their daughter grow up. What followed was a childhood spent navigating two worlds at once: the Indian cultural roots her parents worked hard to preserve, and the distinctly Australian life she was building around her. She learned early that emotions were not openly discussed at home, even as her Australian friends talked freely about their feelings with their parents. By her teenage years, she had begun speaking publicly about her own mental health struggles, a decision her parents questioned. How could something so personal need to be shared?
Today, Niharika works as a mental health professional specialising in multicultural communities. She has come to see that identity and mental wellbeing are inseparable. Being the oldest daughter, being a woman in a traditionally patriarchal culture, being a migrant caught between two worlds, being Australian, these identities do not sit separately inside a person. They talk to each other, shape each other, and directly affect how someone experiences and navigates mental health. She has also seen how many mental health services in Australia, despite good intentions, actively exclude the communities that need them most. A service offered in only one language makes an assumption about who belongs there. It becomes easier to blame migrant communities for not seeking help than to ask whether the services themselves are built to welcome them.
Niharika brings a framework called intentional peer support into her work: relationships built on hope and connection rather than the expert fixing the broken client. She speaks directly to migrants struggling with mental health, offering a simple truth: you are not alone, and support exists in many forms, through language, through art, through dance, through people who have walked similar paths.
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