🇫🇷 Toulouse
France
The pink city, and a door that opens later for some passports
Toulouse is the aerospace capital of Europe and many Iranians here are engineers, technical students or researchers. The city is warm, full of students and pleasant to live in. In the industry Toulouse is built around, though, nationality sometimes enters the equation.
When there is nothing wrong with your CV, and something wrong with your passport
This is written down in very few places and a lot of Iranian engineers in Toulouse have lived it. Much of the aerospace and defence industry falls under technology export-control rules. Those rules work by nationality, not by individual: they are not interested in your personal history, they are interested in your passport.
In practice it looks like this. The interview goes well, then the citizenship question comes up, and the path quietly changes. Or you are inside the company but without access to certain projects, while a newer colleague with less experience has it.
The damage is not only professional. Somebody who studied for years and works well meets a limit that has nothing to do with their competence and that they can do nothing about. That combination, unfairness plus powerlessness, is precisely what produces exhausting anger and then a loss of motivation.
Naming it matters. This is not oversensitivity and it is not imagined, it is a structural fact. Therapy cannot change the regulation, and it can help you keep that fact separate from your sense of your own worth.
Being a student in a city full of students
Toulouse has one of the largest student populations in France and a substantial number of Iranian students. The first years combine academic pressure, the residency question, money limits and homesickness.
University counselling exists and is free, with a limited number of sessions, in French or English. For a student whose French has only just reached the level of their coursework, discussing anxiety in that same language is a different task entirely.
The médecin traitant, the tariff, and what is left
In France you must declare a médecin traitant, a treating doctor; without one your reimbursements drop. The official route runs through them.
A psychiatrist is covered by insurance, but psychotherapy is usually the work of a clinical psychologist, and their private sessions carry no default reimbursement. A national scheme covers a limited number of sessions and the figure has changed more than once, so take the current number from an official source. Public centres are free and have queues.
What Farsi-speaking newcomers in Toulouse find hardest
Export-control restrictions affecting holders of an Iranian passport
Anger and demotivation from a ceiling unrelated to competence
Pressure in the first academic years, and the residency question
Private psychologists not being reimbursed
Limited university counselling and no Farsi option
Distance from family, and the stay-or-return decision
Somewhere you do not have to prove the problem is real
If you have met a career limit because of your nationality, the hardest part is often that it is difficult to explain to anybody who has not experienced it. A Farsi-speaking therapist who has emigrated themselves understands it before you start.
Sessions are online, in Farsi, need no médecin traitant, and there is a lower price for students.
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 Toulouse, 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)