🇨🇭 Geneva
Switzerland
A city where everyone is on a posting and nobody lives here
Geneva is the city of the UN, the Red Cross and dozens of international institutions. Many Iranians here arrived on multi-year contracts. Life is international, it is French-speaking, and it is more expensive than actually living inside the city allows.
Goodbyes that never finish
Contracts in Geneva run two years, three years, or the length of a posting. The colleague beside you this year is in Nairobi or Bangkok next. The friend you have only just become comfortable with leaves in the summer.
The experience has a name: repeated grief. After a few rounds, a person decides without noticing not to get close again, and that decision is what deepens the loneliness, not the goodbyes themselves.
For an Iranian who has already left everything once, that endless cycle of people arriving and going can keep the old wound of migration permanently open.
The border, the rent, and living in two countries
Geneva's housing market is among the tightest in Europe. Many people end up renting across the border in France and commuting daily. It is a rational financial decision with a social consequence: you work in one country and sleep in another, and you are not fully resident in either.
Insurance, tax, your children's schooling, even a driving licence, all come in two versions and none of them are simple. That administrative weight on somebody who has just arrived is heavier than it looks.
Insurance-covered treatment in Geneva
The national Swiss process applies here too: a doctor's prescription, basic insurance coverage, the franchise you chose yourself, and a ten per cent personal share. The canton of Geneva has high premiums, which pushes many people towards a high franchise.
French-speaking therapists are plentiful and English-speaking ones can be found. Farsi-speaking, effectively none. And if your posting moves, the treatment you worked hard to start simply stops there.
What Farsi-speaking newcomers in Geneva find hardest
People around you constantly leaving, and the grief of repeated goodbyes
A housing crisis, and living across the border in France
High cantonal premiums and a heavy franchise
Treatment interrupted when a posting ends
No Farsi-speaking therapist in the region
A parallel administrative life across two countries
A therapist who comes with you to the next posting
Sessions are online, so if you move from Geneva to New York or Nairobi your therapist does not change. For somebody whose life is built out of multi-year postings, that continuity is itself part of the treatment.
And the session is in Farsi, which means talking about the problem itself from the first minute rather than about its cultural background.
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 Geneva, 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)