🇨🇭 Basel
Switzerland
Where three countries meet, belonging is harder
Basel is the centre of Swiss pharmaceuticals and research, and many Iranians here are chemists, biologists, physicians or researchers. The city is small, the German and French borders are minutes away, and that three-way geography shapes daily life.
Three countries, and none of them quite home
Many people working in Basel live in Germany or France and cross the border daily, because rent on the other side is a fraction of what it is here. The calculation is sensible and it has a consequence: the country you work in, the country you sleep in, and the country you came from are none of them entirely home.
For an Iranian immigrant already uprooted once, that geographical scattering can sharpen the same sense of not belonging anywhere. Not because any of the places is bad, but because none of them is fully yours.
Research, fixed-term contracts, and renewal anxiety
Basel's pharmaceutical industry and its university run on project contracts. Two years, three years, tied to the funding of one specific project. For an Iranian researcher that means the renewal question reappears every time you have just settled somewhere.
Contract anxiety, combined with a residency permit attached to the same contract, produces a chronic stress that scientific success does not remove. You can publish well and still not sleep.
The insurance route, and the practical option
As everywhere in Switzerland, psychotherapy is covered by basic insurance on a doctor's prescription, with the franchise you chose and a ten per cent personal share. In a city the size of Basel, English-speaking therapists are limited and Farsi-speaking ones effectively do not exist.
If you live across the border it gets more complicated again: which system, which insurer, which country. Online therapy unties that geographical knot completely.
What Farsi-speaking newcomers in Basel find hardest
Living and working in two different countries, and the paperwork of it
Project contracts and renewal anxiety
Residency tied to an employment contract
Swiss German, and distance from the informal conversations
A small city with limited treatment options
The insurance franchise and the cost of starting treatment
Treatment that does not care about the border
It makes no difference whether you live in Basel or across the border in Germany or France; the session is online and works identically from all three sides.
Emotral's Farsi-speaking therapists know the experience of migration, and starting requires neither a prescription nor a wait.
Farsi-speaking therapists available to you
Every Emotral session is online, so these therapists — wherever in the world they live — are available to Iranians in Basel, and you see the session time in your own local clock.
Lena Ebadi
Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Individual Therapy (Adults)
Dr. Mojgan Shariatpanahi
Individual Therapy (Adults), Family Therapy, Couples Therapy
Dr. Jalal Khademi
PhD in Psychology, Depression, Anxiety & Panic Attacks
Dr. Fatemeh Mesgarian
Analytic Psychotherapy, Individual Therapy (Adults), Individual Counseling
Dr. Farzaneh Abroshan
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Schema Therapy, Group Therapy
Dr. Farzad Rasoulof
Schema Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)