Aditi Razdan interviews Udeni Appuhamilage
Meet Udeni Hanchapola Appuhamilage: a Fulbright Scholar, a clinical psychologist from Sri Lanka with experience in trauma, psychosocial, and humanitarian work, “3 Minute Thesis” winner and an academic at ANU’s school of Culture, Language and History.
I chose to interview Udeni because she embodies a strong female role model in academia for me. As a feminist, I naturally felt compelled to ask if she was too, believing this may have motivated her to pursue success and independence in her career. Her answer initially surprised me, as it was not a categorical ‘yes’, an assumption I often thoughtlessly make. Instead, Udeni considered human categorization “scary”, as she had seen atrocities initiated and perpetrated in the name of various categorizations. In her characteristically thoughtful way, she explained how her experiences growing up during periods of communal violence and the civil war made it clear that exclusive categorisation carries “risks and vulnerabilities”. It marks you for inclusion or exclusion. It disregards the nuanced reality of any identity, and ultimately, can be a tool to stifle independent thought or views that may diverge from or threaten the majority.
When Udeni was growing up, violence was a norm. Often times, people gave up questioning it, or trying to understand it. This is because everyone— those who went missing, those who abducted them, the neighbors who kept silent— belonged to some category and that category offered ‘the’ explanation for the violence. Categories such as ‘traitor’, or ‘terrorist’ were the explanation of violence as well as the tool of it. This grouping, self-imposed or otherwise, justified the ‘othering’ that took place. It existed by no means only in its most extreme forms. There are a number of reasons why one may not question violence: to protect themselves, or because they are accustomed to the violence; and most acquiesce to categorisation. A neighbor won’t necessarily support violence against or the disappearance of someone who is in a different group to themselves, but the actual application of labels, and categorisation itself, is accepted and understood. This was the reality of most social contexts, and is particularly heightened during conflict. Yet according to Udeni, it never did and never will sit right with the human condition—inherently nuanced and rarely static. At such a young age, Udeni explained that “conflict is impossible to understand from an intellectual or political view”, so she experienced the motions of war in their rawest form. The sense of fear and confusion would close in, and there was no one to ask for established answers, as everyone had the same question.
Udeni’s emotional perceptiveness and desire to understand the human condition led her to pursue psychology. Growing up as a child during a civil war, subject to direct and indirect violence, misinformation and terrorism (state-sponsored, and from other sources), she felt compelled to pursue a career that would allow her to do meaningful work and make a difference on someone’s life. She started her career by joining the National Child Protection Authority of Sri Lanka, one of the largest, most prestigious organizations in Sri Lanka, where she got to work with child and adult survivors and perpetrators of various abuses and maltreatments. Yet some of the political and bureaucratic machinations that regulated the child protection systems in the country conflicted with her own ethics, and led her to quit her job. This conscience of hers proved to be a strong guide throughout her career, along with the aversion that her young rebellious mind had for the agenda of the powerful.
Alas, joining a small, locally run NGO as one of only eight clinical psychologists in the country did not escape the pervasive influence of the powerful, as she learned it acted through many different channels. After the Boxing day Tsunami in 2004, well-meaning international NGOs eagerly swarmed in with an abundance of resources. Yet they crucially lacked “cultural competence”. Udeni recalls one European woman walking around administering ‘hugging therapy’, not realizing this signaled to many of the local men a romantic interest and intention to marry.
Udeni contemplated that there will always be ambiguities in the mental health field, arising from the fact that human psychology cannot be tangibly examined or easily understood. In one sense, one’s affect can exist ‘silently’, especially in the aftermath of a civil war where people had learnt to accept the realities and became resigned to suffering silently. In Udeni’s experience, this inevitable elusivity of the human condition, which often is accepted as the reality of human psychology by mental health professionals, while is helpful, also makes it vulnerable to deliberate distortion and interference. Manipulation comes easily when there are not rigid standards or rules that set a periphery around what is unequivocally true.
This was the case when well-resourced, international NGOs demanded quick diagnoses of complex illnesses like PTSD after the tsunami; haste that her NGO opposed. And so in line with her personal ethics, shaped by a wealth of psychological knowledge, Udeni and her fellow colleagues decided to dissolve the NGO. To continue to misdiagnose mental health concerns undermined everything she and her colleagues in the NGO had devoted their careers to. Having grown up with experiences of violence, war and disaster, they were now trying to rehabilitate others and it was particularly confronting to be instructed by the powerful NGOs, which despite overall altruistic intentions, were misguided by quantitative measures of efficiency away from more nuanced and considered progress in improving mental health. Their’s was not the sort of personalised empathy that underpinned her local NGO. She recalled this pivotal moment in her career with an air of melancholy, explaining she would have done more damage had she continued to adhere to the pressures of foreign agendas.
Yet her experiences with various local and international organizations were not the only hindrances she has faced during her pursuit of tangible change. The hardest part of her clinical practice, aside from maintaining her own well-being amidst such trauma, was treating people she knew she could not help. However, she realized these people had exhausted their social contacts and finally summoned the courage (despite the stigma attached to seeking ‘professional psychological help’) to begin to reconcile with the suffering they have endured during and after the war. In a country shadowed by decades of violence, war and instability, there was a tendency for people not to share their personal life-stories with others, even those who presumably shared these lived experiences. These people who had been “constantly failed” by their political system, their social paradigm, silenced by the traumas, were reaching out, yet again, and it was important for their traumas to be acknowledged.
Despite such a taxing field, Udeni’s rich career bore many highlights. One was her summer school fellowship at McGill in Canada. There she was introduced to trans-cultural psychiatry, an emerging body of research that she found “refreshing”. Even though she was an experienced clinical psychologist, it was transformative for her to realize that there were medical intellectuals who rejected the strict evidential rigour of their profession and embraced the ambiguities of the human mind, recognising the danger of rigid categorisation. Whether in a mental health or civil war context, it is this formulaic categorisation that can silence discourse that diverges from the norm, which may ultimately hinder progress. She met people who inspired her with their independent views, who were and are still researching and pioneering flexible approaches to the mental health field.
Whether it is her strong female presence, her underlying empathy and passion, or her personal and professional experiences with human psychology, ‘pathology’ and trauma, Udeni’s focus and explication of silence and human categorisation stood out to me. And this is exactly why she joined academia, to yield tangible results in the lives of all her contemporaries, students and peers alike. Her academic qualifications are no doubt impressive in isolation, yet in conjunction with her experiences in the civil war, and rehabilitative-healing work with others, she enriches and broadens the world-views of those who listen.
