For decades, Justine Hardy has conducted extraordinary international work dealing with the critical issue of trauma and mental health in conflict zones. A trained psychotherapist, author, and longtime journalist in India for the BBC, she founded Healing Kashmir, having become very involved in the region in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake. Healing Kashmir provides unique paramedic training, mental health education and training in the midst of the ongoing often violent, dangerous separatist conflict in the Kashmir Valley in India, a region with dramatically underdeveloped mental health resources. It has been able to reach and treat tens of thousands of people in need, and has developed a unique youth program to break cycles of anxiety and depression in adolescents and young adults. It has done this with a determined egalitarian sensibility, intentionally with a majority Kashmiri staff.
I first met Justine ten years ago, at the Oslo Freedom Forum of the Human Rights Foundation, (HRF) for whom I am a senior strategic adviser. She was a distinguished featured speaker and honoree for her work with Healing Kashmir. I had then just founded the Oslo Scholars Program at the Institute for the HRF, which invites undergraduate and graduate students to attend the Freedom Forum, and pairs them as summer interns with carefully selected Forum activists to assist their work The Institute sent many of its students to very successfully work with Justine, and Healing Kashmir, on the ground in Kashmir over the years through the Oslo Scholars Program. Some alumni of the Institute have continued on working with Healing Kashmir professionally, and thus inspired and mentored, as later professionals in mental health around the world.
I have tremendous admiration and awe for Justine’s intellectual depth, cultural sensitivity, staunch courage, deep empathy, and determined resilience, working with distressed people in an environment that is highly challenging both emotionally and politically. This is especially true since Modi has taken the leadership of India and ethnocentrism and xenophobia reign unchecked.
In 2014, I invited Justine to become an INSPIRE Fellow at the Institute, to help instruct and mentor my students, and to provide insights into her remarkable experience, distinctive cultural sensibility, and extremely impressive positive approach to global mental health. Her work is not restricted to South Asia. Its models are adapted in many circumstances and locales, in the MENA region, England and the U.S. She continues to advise and mentor our community. Many alumni have personally told me time and again of her remarkable value. I was honored by Justine when she agreed to speak about our Institute at our 30th Anniversary Gala celebration.
Her decades of tremendously important work with UK's New Bridge Foundation, focusing on the rehabilitation of life sentence prisoners before their release, and with India's Development Research and Action Group defying slum politics to create schools in Delhi, is likewise indicative of Justine's passion and concern for people in need.