Disclaimer: When I write about Amina, I am reminded how delicate it is to convey another person’s story. It is easy to turn a life into data, or to speak over someone while trying to interpret what they have lived. This essay draws on a composite character. Names and identifying details have been changed, and no confidential or survey data has been breached.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile travelling across Kashmir as part of the National Mental Health Survey, I got to meet Amina. I recall the first time I met her on the cold morning outside of her house, with the orchard road barely visible. The Azaan from the neighbourhood Masjid passed through the village, cutting through the quiet. Then a military vehicle drove by as we were talking.  Amina held back and remained apprehensive until it was out of sight. She spoke quietly, in Kashmiri, about the nights when her father’s ghost sat by her bed and about the days when army jeeps rattled past the trees. She had no vocabulary for what clinical categories describe as “trauma” or “PTSD.” For her, grief unfolded gradually, over time.

Amina lost her father as a child, in the middle of Kashmir’s conflict, and she was too young to remember what had happened. “The emptiness came later,” she said, “sneaking into the house, settling in.” Most days, she was on her own. According to Save the Children (2014), conflict in Kashmir has left an estimated 214,000 children orphaned, many losing one or both parents to violence. “I only understood what I had lost when I grew older,” she said. The loss moved through her memory, settled in her body, in ways that are hard to put into words.

It was only when she grew older that what she had experience was given the descriptive term of trauma or PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She uttered these words and their acronym slowly, not sure what they meant. “They say it means something that has happened before,” she said. “But for us, nothing is before.” In that simple sentence lay the dissonance between categorisations and reality. What she described was not memory returning, but living within something that was never resolved.

In prolonged instability, power is lived not only through violence but through daily control over how people carry their bodies. A passing patrol or a checkpoint is enough to quiet a voice or slow a step. Over time, people learn to make themselves inconspicuous. This is not simply anxiety; it is the body adapting to constant surveillance. Each restrained movement is a practical response to an environment that governs even how one breathes.

Many trauma models treat time as a straight line: an event happens, it scars you, and with enough care, life returns to normal. Such models do not fit here. Violence does not stay in the past. It flows into the present, remains suspended, and shapes the way people move through their days. People stay alert in their daily lives. They change how they walk, how they speak, even how they restrain their words and their use of language. Frantz Fanon articulated it well when he stated, “violence is not just an event you survive, it becomes the pattern for everyday life”. In such settings, care quietly asks “who must change?” The question is not only about healing; it is about “why the person is expected to change while the situation around them does not?”. When suffering is framed as a personal issue, the conditions behind it are ignored.

I went back to the survey and asked the usual questions, about sleep, fear, and sadness. Amina took her time with each answer. She told me the support was there, but it was just not enough, since the counselling sessions themselves could only go so far.

Looking back, it made sense as to why she struggled. A lot of it came down to how the Western therapeutic frameworks work, and in particular approaches like CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), which ask the subjects to reflect on their thoughts and feelings, to find new ways to cope. But for Amina, such an approach never really fit. She did not push back against it, but the whole process felt like it placed the responsibility for change on her, while the conditions around her remained the same. Sometimes, getting a diagnosis did not feel like help. It just felt like another burden she had to carry.

As the day went on, Amina spoke about what had been missing all these years. There had never been space to grieve, she said, not inside her home, not beyond it. Her father’s death existed as something known but rarely spoken of. Silence around loss settled gradually, shaped by fear, caution, and the understanding that some losses were safer when left unnamed. Slowly, mourning itself carried a sense of shame. What happened to her was not her fault, yet she carried its weight alone and by herself.

Many people I spoke with described life as moving between the calm and the crisis. Anxiety and hypervigilance are ordinary here.  Amina’s everyday life, her home, her streets exist within this larger landscape. When trauma is treated as something that belongs only to the past, as a single event, it does not reflect this reality. Such an understanding only scratches the surface, while missing the rest of life happening all around it.

Listening to Amina, I could not help but think of Fanon’s writings. Back in colonial Algeria, he argued that psychological suffering cannot be separated from systems of control. He saw that Algerians and French settlers lived on the same land but did not live the same lives under the colonial rule. In Kashmir too, suffering lives within the ordinary, at checkpoints, in disappearances, in what never returns. Violence, in Fanon’s account, structures everyday life, shaping both body and thought. Amina did not describe her pain as a “disorder.” What she described instead was constraint, how her body stayed tense, how fear shaped daily routines, and how movement was controlled. Her pain made sense only when seen alongside the political conditions of her daily life.

Sigmund Freud (1917) described mourning as a gradual process and melancholia as unresolved loss lodged in the unconscious. But what happens when loss is not private but collective, and unending? In such cases, trauma is not an interruption; it is deeply rooted in life itself. In Kashmir grief is lived in daily routines, bodies, and shared spaces. It is not just lodged in the unconscious but lives out in the open. The suffering here is not confined only to nightmares or flashbacks. Trauma is often seen as an episode followed by recovery. This understanding fails to capture the ongoing, lived reality of collective suffering and challenges the idea of trauma as a short term “disorder” that can simply be cured or overcome.

For Amina, grief was not something to get over. It was the only place where she still felt her father’s presence. Memory was not just personal; it was an act of resistance. She saw his death as unjust, of someone taken from her by force. What followed that moment—the fear, the silence, the tension in her body—was neither accidental nor inevitable, but something imposed by a system.

As such, remembering became resistance. It became her way of saying that his life, his death, could not just be folded into numbers or clinical words. Some of Amina’s most sustaining moments were outside clinical spaces. Sitting together in silence. Remembering. Those moments did not alter her pain, but they made it possible to bear. For her, healing came from presence, not from being fixed.

In Kashmir, people often get through life via shared practices such as visiting Sufi shrines or holy sites to seek solace, taking part in religious and spiritual practices, reciting poetry, and singing traditional songs. Much of this space has slowly eroded away, and at times, has deliberately been muted. Mosques that once hosted large prayer gatherings are often locked now. Languages have been disrupted and the local folklore is fading. Places where people used to gather freely are now harder to access. And yet, people continue. They speak, sing and pray. Sometimes they just remember, any way they still can or know how. These are not just ways of surviving or of performing tradition but ways of holding on to each other and trying to keep what matters from being lost, even when much around them works against it.

It was in this context that I started to notice where my own frameworks did not fit. Amina’s suffering could not be tied to a single moment, and it was not only in her body. It was shaped by power, control, and structures that governed her life, the burden of which she carried every day, quietly, without a name. My own positionality became clear; I could neither justify nor resolve her grief. All I could do was bear witness, hold space, and recognize her experience as testimony, not reduce it to a pathology.

Questioning PTSD in Kashmir is not about denying the suffering at its core, it is about resisting its depoliticization. The clinical imposition of PTSD often fails because it assumes a linear temporal logic; a “post” period that does not exist in a landscape of ongoing domination. Amina’s experience illustrates precisely this: the Western therapeutic insistence on a “before” and “after” clashes with reality, where, as she put it, “nothing is before.” Amina carries her father not as a memory she can just put aside, but as a companion in her daily life. Sometimes it brings her comfort, other times fatigue. By keeping him present, she quietly resists the forces that would erase her experience. Choosing not to “move on” is both an act of agency and a burden. Grief here is not fixed; it shifts with daily life and the social realities around her.

References

Save the Children. (2014). Orphaned in Kashmir: The state of orphans in Jammu and Kashmir. Save the Children UK.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)

Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)

de Jong, K., van de Kam, S., Ford, N., Lokuge, K., Fromm, S., van Galen, R., & Reilley, B. (2008). Conflict in the Indian Kashmir Valley II: Psychosocial impact. Conflict and Health, 2, Article 11. https://doi.org/10.1186/1752-1505-2-11

de Jong, K., et al. (2019). Trauma in the Kashmir Valley and the mediating effect of stressors of daily life on symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. Conflict and Health, 13, Article 58. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-019-0245-6

Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and melancholia. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14, pp. 237–258). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1917)

Summerfield, D. (2001). The invention of post-traumatic stress disorder and the social usefulness of a psychiatric category. BMJ, 322(7278), 95–98. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.322.7278.95

Varma, S. (2020). The occupied clinic: Militarism and care in Kashmir. Duke University Press.