An Afghan woman who struggled to find culturally competent mental health care is now training to fill that gap for her community.
Three years ago, Zohra Obaidy sat alone at her laptop late at night, typing symptoms into Google. She felt tired in a way that sleep could not fix. In Afghanistan, she had been energetic. She was the kind of person who asked the questions that no one else would, and she was the person who made space for voices others ignored. But in America, she stopped asking questions, and the days flattened into sameness.
“I was always a happy person in Afghanistan,” she says. “But every day, I was feeling down.”
Depression was not a word her community used openly. Mental health was whispered about, if discussed at all. When Obaidy raised it with her physician, the response was perfunctory. Get some rest, stay off screens. It was a stranger on Facebook who finally asked: “Why are you not trying to go to a therapist?”
Finding one proved nearly impossible.
Obaidy wanted someone who spoke Dari and who understood Afghan family structures. She was looking for someone who could sit with the culture without flinching. She wanted a therapist she would not have to explain herself to.
“I couldn’t find any therapist from my own country who was licensed in my area,” she said.
She settled for a Persian therapist. The language was close, but the world and experiences were not. The therapist had never been raised in Afghanistan and did not understand the specific weight of being an Afghan woman balancing traditional expectations while building a new life in America.
The gap was not abstract. Obaidy describes a situation she sees in her community. A woman whose husband is controlling, even physically abusive, seeks help. An American therapist’s first instinct might be to tell her to leave.
An Afghan therapist would understand something more complicated. The woman may have no income of her own and no family support outside the marriage. Advising divorce without addressing those realities can drive her out of therapy entirely, back into isolation and danger.
“We don’t have advice to end the marriage for this kind of situation,” Obaidy said.
The abuse is not acceptable. But safety means understanding what a woman stands to lose, and building alternatives before issuing ultimatums.
Obaidy committed to therapy anyway. After six months, she could talk to her husband with clarity instead of exhaustion. Her own recovery sharpened what she had been seeing all along.
“I noticed many Afghan women struggling with mental issues,” she said. “But not only them. Their husbands, their family members, and their kids.”
She watched people take referrals from their doctors and refuse to go. The stigma and fear of being judged and bringing shame on the family kept people from going.
When Obaidy took a job at a Christian nonprofit, she arrived braced for judgment. She found the opposite.
“My boss, my coworkers, everyone gave me the feeling that I’m at home,” she said. “They always invited me to the parties. I worked at other offices as well, but I never got that connection.”
Stigma, she realized, was only part of what kept her community from care. The larger barrier was trust, and having someone who understood the context behind the diagnosis. The therapist her community needed did not exist.
So she decided to become that person.
“Some days are like the same life, the same brain… It’s kind of meaningless,” she said. “We need to bring that meaning to our lives. For me, that meaning is helping others. My job in the community and as a human in this world is to help other people. That is the thing that gives me meaning.”
For an Afghan woman, deciding to pursue an education and being allowed to pursue it are two different things.
“Everything for women from Afghanistan is more difficult than for men,” Obaidy said. “We need to fight for our rights, for every little right.”
In her upbringing, men were expected to earn and to study. Women were expected to run the home and raise the children. Her ambition required negotiation. It needed justification for her family and proof that it would not upend the household.
“It takes time for me to convince myself that I have this right,” she said, “and to convince my family members as well to support me.”
Obaidy separates what she values in her culture from what she fights.
“What I really like about our culture is being flexible,” she said, against the rigidity of American rules and systems. “I love this flexibility that we have. But there are many other things that I don’t like, especially when it comes to differentiating between men and women.”
But the path she wanted cost money she did not have.
Then she learned about the America’s Allies Scholarship Program (AASP). AASP is a partnership between the Afghan Future Fund and No One Left Behind, built for Afghan and Iraqi Special Immigrant Visa holders who served alongside U.S. forces. In 2025, it provided up to $15,000 per recipient for accredited programs, along with mentorship and community support.
The first cycle drew more than 800 applications. Twenty-one people were selected, sharing more than $110,000. Obaidy was one of them.
“It gives me peace of mind that I have support,” she says.
Before coming to the United States, Obaidy worked as an advocacy officer for a USAID program in Afghanistan, where she and her husband both served. Her job was to raise the voices of people who had no one to represent them. That service qualified them for the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) pathway. Today, Obaidy sits in a community college classroom surrounded by students half her age, taking notes on developmental psychology. She already knows her path will include a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in family therapy. Then it’s two years of supervised clinical work and the licensing exam. Five years at minimum, all walked while raising children and renegotiating expectations at every turn.
She knows exactly who she is becoming. She will be the therapist who speaks the language and understands how shame works in Afghan families. She will hold a woman’s complexity without making her choose between heritage and healing.
The next Afghan woman who feels lost and goes looking for help will not have to settle for almost right.
She will have Zohra.
