This brief highlights innovative and creative applications of established clinical interventions across different systemic models, with clients of South Asian Indian background, including foundational, contemporary, and empirically based approaches. Chapters illustrate a specific systemic intervention and how it has been adapted and therapeutically applied by each author to a particular South Asian Indian client population (e.g., LGBTQ+ youth, recent immigrant families, interracial couples) and specific presenting problem issue (e.g., SUDs, affective disorders, couple intimacy issues, parenting, partner selection, career, technology, etc.). In addition, chapters provide practical ideas for the application of systemic interventions through service delivery approaches that address the unique needs of this client population.

Key areas of coverage include:

• Specific systemic interventions that have been creatively adapted for clinical application with South Asian Indian clients.
• Step-by-step process of adapting and utilizing the systemic intervention.
• Innovative intervention, assessment, and service delivery models.
• Case examples highlighting the development and application of specific systemic interventions.
• Recommendations for clinicians to expand and elaborate established systemic models to better address the diverse needs of diverse client populations.

Systemic Therapy with South Asian Populations is an essential resource for clinicians, therapists, and practitioners as well as researchers, professors, and graduate students in family studies, clinical psychology, and public health, as well as all interrelated disciplines.

Shruti Singh Poulsen, PhD, LMFT is a core faculty member in the online MA/PsyD CFT program, and the co-Branch Director of the online MA program at Alliant University. Dr. Poulsen has been a clinician, an academic, and scholar in the field of CFT since 1994. Dr. Poulsen’s research interests and scholarly work are primarily in the areas of cross-cultural responsiveness in CFT, clinical supervision, training, and teaching, and also focusing on interracial, multiracial couples and families, and the experience of immigration and its impact on individuals, couples, and families. In 2026-2017, Dr. Poulsen was a Fulbright Scholar at a university in Istanbul, Turkiye.

Gita Seshadri, Ph.D. LMFT, is a Professor in the Couple and Family Therapy Program at Alliant University (Sacramento, California and online). Her research, publications and presentations focus on interracial/cultural/religious couples and families, diversity, intersectionality constructs, qualitative research, gender perspectives of power within culture, grief, anger management, relapse prevention, and sexuality. She works with diverse clinical populations and maintains a private practice. Her integrative approach focuses on support and empowerment through the lens of postmodern and modern theories.

Rajeswari Natrajan-Tyagi, PhD, LMFT is an adjunct professor and Professor Emeritus in the Couple and Family Therapy Program at Alliant University, and also in private practice. She teaches at both the master’s and the doctoral level. Her research includes areas of South Asian mental health, immigration & acculturation, bicultural parenting, cultural competency in psychotherapy and self-of-the-therapist issues. She is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California and provides mental health services to South Asian Indian clients in Southern California. She also has a master’s in social work from Madras School of Social Work, Chennai, India. Dr. Natrajan-Tyagi has been collaborating on community mental health and research projects with Saahas for Cause for over three years.