For service providers

For psychologists, counsellors, and mental health practitioners who work with or want to learn about the Asian community

Shapes and Sounds

is the leading and trusted voice for Asian mental health in Australia.

The Asian community makes up 18% of the overall Australian population and our aim at Shapes and Sounds is to ensure that you feel confident and resourced in providing culturally-responsive mental health care to our community.

We're home to over 110+ Asian private practitioners who are leading the way in delivering culturally-responsive care to our communities on the ground, and we're partnered with Monash University's Culture Trauma and Mental Health Lab who are pioneering cross-cultural psychology research.

We're honoured to have supported a broad range of mental health services to understand the mental health needs of the Asian community in Australia.

Cultural-competency
training and workshops

We can help you to:

  • Effectively address the negative stigma that surrounds mental health in many Asian communities and families
  • Ensure that your service is culturally-responsive to the mental health needs of the broad and diverse Asian community in Australia
  • Become aware of the different socio-political shifts and changes across Asia that impact the thoughts, behaviours and mental health presentations of the Asian Australian community.

We provide tailor-made solutions to support your service including:

  • Trainings and workshops
  • Consulting services
  • Cultural supervision

Download our training package proposal for a more detailed breakdown of content and pricing:

Our research partner

Since 2023, we’ve proudly partnered with the Culture, Trauma and Mental Health Group at Monash University led by Professor Laura Jobson.The Monash team undertakes cutting-edge research into the cultural influences on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment, and are deeply committed to conducting and translating community-led, culturally-responsive research that can better inform mental health care in Australia.

This partnership is driven by our shared commitment to challenging Western-centric mental health models and building cultural competency.Furthermore, their research directly informs our cultural competency trainings, helping mental health practitioners apply the latest insights to provide more effective and inclusive care.

Our Publications
Building an evidence base to inform culturally-responsive post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment: Recommendations for mental health practitionersQuestioning the Promise of Safety in Trauma-Informed Music Therapy Practice
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Considering Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist influences on daily emotion regulation and affect in Chinese Australian trauma survivors
Read More

“Shapes and Sounds led us through an engaging webinar that compelled us to think deeper about the negative stigma that surrounds mental health in Asian communities. The webinar shared clear strategies about how we, as genetic counsellors, could identify and address stigma to further support our Asian clients and their families. Coming from an Asian background myself, I found that the webinar was relevant but also deeply inclusive of counsellors of all backgrounds.”

- Michelle, Australasian Society for Genetic Counsellors

Enquire about cultural-competency trainings to stay aligned with the new Professional Competencies for Psychologists

We can support you via group in-person trainings or, our online cultural competency recorded training

Trainings for yourself
Learn more
Trainings for your team

In October 2024,

we worked with headspace Syndal who are a headspace site located in a high Asian-population area of Melbourne.

hSyndal wanted to learn more about culturally-responsive practice specifically for the Asian population, to ensure that the team were well equipped to meet the needs of the young people presenting to the service.

The team highlighted that they were finding it challenging to approach mental health conversations with the parents of young, Asian people, and this was then impacting on the young person’s care and recovery.

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Our Solution

We delivered a 90 minute online PD covering the causes of negative stigma in Asian communities, the impact of factors such as skilled migration and cultural dissonance on migrant family units, and a deep dive into the frameworks that underpin the way in which many Asian parents may be approaching mental health services.

Shortly after the training, we learned that the hSyndal team felt like they had the proper terminology to explain and discuss some of the presentations they were seeing, leading to greater conversations in their case reviews and team meetings.
Furthermore, some team members were able to reflect on some past interactions with young people of Asian identities, and led one team member to call a young person who had recently disengaged from the service to outline how they may have missed some cultural nuances in their interaction.

Since then,

the training has been shared with all new team members as part of their onboarding requirements, and we look forward to hearing more about their continuing and strengthening relationship with the young people they support!

Stay informed, stay connected.
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Shapes and Sounds acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land that our organisation operates on. We pay respect to First Nations Elders; past and present, and we acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded and that a treaty has never been signed. Shapes and Sounds acknowledges the devastating impact of colonisation and brutality on the mental health of First Nations and Indigenous people. As Asian settlers on this Sacred land, we strive to utilise our own ancestries' experiences of colonisation, displacement and collective grief to ensure that we no longer perpetuate oppressive structures.

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