Hugh Pope

I’m writing with news of something I’ve helped work on for over the past 18 months with one of my heroes, American writer and ex-international correspondent Jonathan Randal. It’s called the Kurdistan Mental Health Project. It’s a ray of hope at a time when people are enduring several conflicts around the world that once again are killing, maiming and uprooting lives.

Thanks to this project, a gift in the name of the foreign correspondents and researchers who have covered Iraqi Kurdistan’s ordeals, 30 young psychology graduates and practitioners will begin on 16 January 2024 being trained across Iraqi Kurdistan at the start of a two-year course on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

This ‘talking’ treatment is a first step to help Kurds move sustainably beyond their traumatic history: brutal campaigns by Saddam Hussein, the genocidal Islamic State assault on the Yezidis and other violence that has scarred the region. Despite Kurdish society’s pressing need for access to contemporary psychological treatment, there is not much beyond medication and/or denial being done to overcome the personal and collective damage done by these ordeals.

You can find out more about the Kurdistan Mental Health Project here on the website of the Anglo-Kurdish charity that thought up the project. The therapy is being taught online by a group of teachers linked to Oxford University and being coordinated on the ground by an Iraqi Kurdish training center.

The first two years of the project are being paid for by an anonymous gift in the name of friends of Kurdistan, many of them journalists, who researched in or reported on the region. In part, this is a ‘thank you’ to all the Kurds who so generously helped those who travelled there. Despite the risks, they ensured our access to people and safety getting in – and out – of Kurdistan to inform the outside world about their long-suppressed cause.

Ideally, the project will find new backers to run four years more, at which point we hope the Kurdistan Regional Government will keep it going. You can scroll down to the bottom of the page from here to sign up to a newsletter that will post occasional updates about the project. Or if you like, click here to find out how to make a private donation, if you like.

We’d love it if you would please help spread the word, which we hope would attract support from outside governments (some are already interested) and the bigger foundations already present in Iraqi Kurdistan. Such institutional funding is likely the best way to get the Kurdistan Mental Health Project on its legs.

Please do forward a link to this post to anyone you think might like to hear about this, or post a few of your own words on social media with a link to project’s page on the charity website, perhaps accompanied by a picture of yourself in action in Iraqi Kurdistan and the hashtag #kurdistanmentalhealth. These would both be wonderful ways to show solidarity with this initiative.