Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Thank you for inviting us.

Jamika, I thought I might begin by asking you about some of your journey that leads up to this book.

You began working as a humanitarian worker in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, long before you became a researcher and long before you did many of the programs that kind of underlie the book's findings.

Back in the 1990s, What were you doing as a local humanitarian worker? And when people in front of you were suffering from disasters, what did you do before all this training became part of your repertoire?

So in 90s in Sri Lanka, the one side there was war going on, but then also country was affected by various different disasters like droughts and floods and all of that.

So most of us who were in the field, we were engaging with providing the basic needs, the food, shelter, health, nutrition, all of that.

However, in that 90s was also the time that we as Sri Lanka, we were flooded by mental health researchers from European, North American countries because it was the end of the Cold War.

Because during the Cold War, we didn't talk so much about PTSD, trauma, or any mental health issues of refugees, because there are two interesting elements to that.

We haven't talked in the book, though, although we established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945, we didn't do human rights during the Cold War, because Europe and North America, or if you like, the capitalist camp, didn't want to do human rights for the communists.

So the Human Rights Council was only established in 1993 and 1994.

In that, also the refugees or the displaced populations during the Cold War period, especially from Russian or the Eastern European context, were treated as heroes.

We never talked about PTSD in that sense.

However, with the end of the Cold War, we started to see an increase of small and local wars in many parts of Africa, many parts of West Asia.

And suddenly, we needed to figure out how to engage with these refugees without that hero label.

And so Sri Lanka was one of the places which was easy access.

It was a small island.

And the war was going on for a long period.

So in that, we are a group of people that got subjected to research but also experiments on mental health.

in the 90s, I would argue.

And that was the first introduction to mental health, and mostly on a severe point of view.

However, even then, one of the bigger aspects that I've seen among disaster or crisis-affected populations is that They were not asking for mental health support.

They were asking for practical help for food, the shelter, security, safety and all of that.

So that was an early experience.

So that's what I was doing at the time.

So for you as a local humanitarian worker sitting in between the local population and these mental health specialists who are coming in from abroad, how did you mediate between them? What kind of position or situation did you find yourself where you had to be kind of in this middle kind of role?