written by members of Free Clinic NYC

We are a group of therapists and organizers in New York (and beyond) committed to Palestinian liberation, prison abolition, and accessible and liberatory therapeutic care. In the spring of 2024, Free Clinic NYC grew out of an urgent call from New York City-based Gaza Solidarity Encampments to connect encampment organizers and participants with therapeutic support. Since last spring, Free Clinic NYC has been offering therapy to people impacted by state repression, including people impacted by Palestinian genocide, Islamophobia, racism, police violence, zionist repression, and interpersonal conflict and burnout within organizing contexts.

We seek to prioritize people whose access to therapeutic care has been systemically denied, those who have experienced violence in the context of therapeutic care, and people who are Black, Indigenous, and of color. 

We are working toward a redistributive economy of time and money in which those who can afford to pay or have insurance help fund therapy for those who can’t or don’t. The Free Clinic is for those who desire beyond what we’ve been told therapy is and how we’ve been trained to practice it. The Free Clinic is for desiring beyond what is here now, as we move toward a practice that cares for, alongside, and within struggle.

The formation of the clinic as a group

We first came together as a group of eight practitioners in response to a request for support from people impacted by the police raid of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at City College, The City University of New York (CUNY) on April 30, 2024. Some of us were CUNY students and adjunct faculty members and participated in the encampment. Some of us already knew each other socially, through other political formations, and through both institutional and para-institutional psychoanalytic study contexts. Some of us had participated in a peer support and process group the previous year. Some of us met on a Signal chat and came together for the first time in the days following the raid. 

In the process of responding to the initial request for support from encampment participants last spring, we ran into questions: When you’ve just been beaten by a cop, or over the following weeks and months, when your job or housing or legal status and health is stripped or threatened, do you want a spreadsheet with names of therapists and links to their websites? At what moments in the cycle of action and repression can therapeutic relationships serve and help sustain the ongoingness of struggle, psychically and materially? What does this look like?

We were responding to a concrete request for support, and we were also responding to the principled ways the Encampment disrupted the university’s conditions of alienation and challenged the university’s entrenchment in systems of dominance: its relations of antiblackness, zionism and the U.S. war machine, racial capitalism, colonialism, and gender-based violence that also shape how therapy is accessed and structured in the city heart of U.S. empire. The ways the Encampment materialized our interdependence by holding the psychic and political distance between Harlem and Palestine: where “holding” is both a way of collapsing the distance and respecting its reality. 

In the process of responding to the immediate request for support, we named shared political, clinical, and spiritual aspirations for a collective therapeutic practice that is also an organizing practice.So, instead of circulating resource lists that might vanish on the internet by the time someone’s ready to use them, we began to build the framework for a decentralized free clinic: with the hope that as there continue to be requests for support — and that as the barriers to accessing meaningful support continue to grow and change — we can continue to respond, and in the process, to cultivate a collective approach to practice: one that agitates and keeps us responsive and together, rather than mollified and apart.

What we’re doing

At this time, we’re a network of nearly 100 therapists offering free and accessible short-term and long-term therapeutic support to people impacted by state repression, which might include people impacted by Palestinian genocide, Islamophobia, racism, police violence, zionist repression, and interpersonal conflict and burnout within organizing contexts. We seek to prioritize people whose access to therapeutic care has been systemically denied, those who have experienced violence in the context of therapeutic care, and people who are Black, Indigenous, and of color. 

We recognize both the possibilities for meaningful, politically-aligned time-limited work in which no money is exchanged, and the possibilities and limitations of both a short-term frame, and the absence of a fee (who can afford to work for free?). Similarly, we recognize both the possibilities and limitations of dyadic, one-to-one therapeutic relationships as the primary form for our work. We hope to offer groups and continue to explore what it would take to be able to offer long-term, ongoing therapeutic care through the Free Clinic. Some Free Clinic therapeutic dyads are already working together longer-term, within an ongoing, mutually determined frame. These navigations of time and money, among other collective practices, continue to take form.

The Free Clinic NYC Request for Support Form and Therapist Interest Forms have been circulating via organizing networks and in-person mutual aid events. We have grown primarily through organizing relationships and word of mouth, and are now composed of a coordinating committee and working groups focused on clinic choreography, peer supervision, relationships, and research. 

We are working toward a redistributive economy of time and money in which those who can afford to pay or have insurance help fund therapy for those who can’t or don’t. The Free Clinic is for those who desire beyond what we’ve been told therapy is and how we’ve been trained to practice it. The Free Clinic is for desiring beyond what is here now, as we move toward a practice that cares for, alongside, and within struggle.

At this point, we have not sought out grant funding or institutional support for the Free Clinic’s operations. We continue to ask questions about what this means: what this means for the kinds of therapeutic relationships we’re facilitating, for what happens in sessions, what forms of interdependence and reflection we’re able to cultivate, and how to sustain our work, how to sustain one another. And, how being together can provide critical forms of psychic and social sustenance.

The choreography working group continues to match people seeking support with therapists offering free and accessible care. We continue to develop additional choreography that responds to both the needs of people seeking support and people offering care. The relationships working group collaborates with other political groups and formations to participate in mutual aid events, block parties, and care days, including groups organizing across the CUNY system, groups organizing for prison abolition, against ICE, against gentrification, and for anti-carceral care.

We have also been cultivating practices to support one another as therapists. Since July 2024, the peer supervision working group has been facilitating monthly supervision groups, and has more recently begun to offer other forms of peer supervision. The supervision sessions have become a meaningful way for Free Clinic therapists to connect and talk with one another as we continue to learn together about what it means to practice freely. In summer 2025, the first Free Clinic NYC reading group formed to study transnational histories, practices, political strategies, and theories of psychoanalytic free clinics. From Free Clinic NYC, working groups and free clinics are presently emerging in places including Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. 

Join us

Free Clinic NYC therapists and practitioners are committed to Palestinian liberation and struggles against antiblack policing and repression. They must also have a principled commitment to accessible mental health care. They may be any kind of therapist, practicing any therapeutic modalities in a principled way. We are excited to collaborate with therapists who are licensed (any clinical licenses), as well as those who are not licensed but have substantial training and experience (such as crisis counselors, peer counselors, mental health community medics, and others who choose not to be licensed). Our focus at this time is on offering support and on building a community of aligned therapists in NYC. We are also connecting with aligned therapists and initiatives beyond NYC and invite participation from therapists beyond NYC who are comfortable offering remote, no-cost sessions across state lines.

Founding coordinators of Free Clinic NYC hold psychoanalytic commitments and are invested in histories of psychoanalytic Free Clinics. These commitments guide us toward deep respect for the presently unknown and unknowable, for unconscious processes within the subject and group psyches, as well as critical questions about the institutions in which we sometimes work, train, and seek care. Among our coordinating committee are therapeutic practitioners, psychoanalysts, and non-therapists with different education and training backgrounds, different experiences as patients, and different theoretical commitments. Among our wider network of Free Clinic NYC therapists are therapists who practice from other modalities. We are cultivating collaborations with non-therapist organizers, including those active in mutual aid, harm reduction, Palestine solidarity organizing, anti-ICE organizing, and anti-prison organizing, as the network of those seeking support through the Free Clinic to people who have been forcibly displaced from Palestine and people presently incarcerated in New York State.

We seek to embrace these differences as foundational to our work and growth.If you would like to join Free Clinic NYC as a therapist, organizer, and/or working group member, fill out the Free Clinic NYC Therapist and Working Group Member Form. If you have questions about opportunities to collaborate, to get involved, and/or to request support, you can email us at Free.Clinic.NYC@protonmail.com.