Dear ESTSS Members,
I would like to express gratitude for another fascinating year of our cooperation, summarize 2019 achievements and invite everyone to participate in the upcoming 2020 ESTSS activities.
Let me start off by recalling the very successful Conference in Rotterdam, which brought together colleagues from around the world and created a wonderful opportunity to reflect on different aspects of psychological trauma, exchange experiences on how to provide the best possible help to people in need, and promote resilience, recovery and prevention. I would like to express my special gratitude to the Dutch Speaking Traumatic Stress Society (NtVP) for their excellent work in making the Rotterdam Conference a real success.
In 2019 we began celebration of the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Psychotraumatology (EJPT) – another success story of ESTSS. We are marking this anniversary with series of ESTSS workshops, which had an effective start this Fall in Tbilisi, Georgia. Two additional ESTSS workshops will be conducted in 2020 – one in May in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and one in October in Coimbra, Portugal.
I am very happy to note that ESTSS is growing: in 2019 the Israeli Society for Traumatic Stress Research joined our family of European trauma societies; the Chilean Society is also in the process of applying for affiliated membership, and we are very much looking forward to their engagement.
The implementation stage of the renewed certification structure and curricula has been launched successfully. The movement towards pan-European certification – assuring high professional standards in the field of trauma care – is moving forward, and we are extremely pleased with that development.
Speaking of high professional standards, the process of updating the TENTS guidelines – one of the key ESTSS products - began this past year, and we plan to have the updated guidelines ready to present at the 17th bi-annual Conference in Belfast.
The ESTSS 2021 Conference in Belfast is under preparation, and I would like to acknowledge the UK PTS team for the admirable job they do in these regards.
Special thanks also to UK PTS colleagues for organizing ESTSS 2020 Young Minds Summer School (YMSS) in Belfast. We hope that YMSS 2020 will attract young professionals from different countries and create a platform for further sharing of experiences and networking both between the generations and within the generations of psychotraumatologists.
There is a lively movement within our organization regarding establishment of task forces. The groundwork has been laid for introducing two important new task forces – one for traumatic grief; and another for development of curricula for children and adolescents. I would like to express gratitude to the ESTSS future leadership group for facilitating that process.
Europe continues to face a number of internal and external challenges, which make our work even more necessary and meaningful. Among those challenges are: coping with armed conflicts and political tensions, responding in culturally sensitive ways to the needs of migrants from conflict zones, dealing with the painful past, countering abuses of social media, such as trolling and disinformation, etc. Together we can address those challenges in the most effective way.
I wish you, dear colleagues, Happy Holidays!
Looking forward to a very interesting and exciting new year: to generate best knowledge in support of those who are in need in order to make them stronger.
Jana (Darejan) Javakhishvili
President of ESTSS
