In another article about her work, Sardana’s mentor at Columbia University, Lena Verdeli, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology and education, said, “Srishti brings iron self-discipline, high intelligence, creativity, knowledge in psychosocial support, and a visceral understanding of different cultures. She is our rock.”
On her UWM bio page, Sardana wrote:
I seek to answer two questions in my research, clinical practice and teaching:
1) How do we build systems of care that meet the increasing mental health treatment gap in low- and middle-income countries as well as in high income countries with low mental health resources, and
2) To explore who, what, where, when and how do we collaborate and synergize in domestic and international regions to learn together and build efficient capacity in adaptation and delivery of evidence-based mental health and psychotherapy resources around the world.
Working to improve global mental health
When I contacted Dr. Sardana last week, she was just back from Burundi. “It’s a forgotten humanitarian emergency,” she said. “It’s at the edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the DRC has been at war for a while.
“The DRC is also declared to be the most unsafe country in the world for women and girls because women and girls have been used as weapons of war. We don’t see that very often now. It used to be an old strategy of battle, but in the Congo, it’s very alive. The DRC is up on the mountains and right at the foothills of the mountains is Burundi, which is a small Francophone African country.
“One of the things we were doing was to establish the first coordinated effort for the mental health response for refugees who are coming in from Congo and resettling in Burundi quite rapidly. Burundi being a low-income country, among the poorest countries in the world, there’s very little for its own people and then to absorb about 200,000 refugees in a matter of a year has created a significant resource constraint.”