I took the first year of a two-year programme in psychotherapy and did what my fellow students were doing: I attended lectures and seminars, workshops and mock psychotherapy sessions, supervision sessions and career-orientation events. I interviewed 20 research participants.
The programme I took, as many programmes of this sort in Russia, was heavily oriented towards therapists who wished to become private practitioners or who were already practising privately but wanted to upgrade their portfolio with a new modality or skills. This fieldwork allowed me to capture a unique moment in the history of Russian psychotherapy when private psychotherapy was booming as never before; when, due to the pandemic, the supply and demand of therapy provided online or in a blended regime were skyrocketing; and when emerging psychotherapy platforms were affecting the working aspirations and professional standards of self-employed psychotherapists. But there was another very important and tragic aspect to that moment: right in the middle of my fieldwork, Russia started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which significantly affected both the content and the format of many therapists’ work, and my fieldwork, too.
I completed my fieldwork online from abroad, following the lectures and workshops that I would have done in person, but via videoconferencing tools. This provided me with a set of ethnographic experiences and data that was not initially planned, but gave insight into the specificity of contemporary private mental health work rapidly adapting to new configuration and addressing the very many ethical and professional challenges that this new configuration brought about.