Excerpted from the September, 2000 NESTTD Newsletter
Dear NESTTD Members and Supporters:
I am writing this column on the last Sunday in August, a time of year when my thoughts and probably yours are focused more on rest and relaxation than on work. As we go into fall, hopefully with renewed energy and commitment to our clinical practice, NESTTD is planning a new year of programs to inspire and educate its members. But this year, we are experiencing a sense of duress that is new for our organization: our membership is at an all time low, despite our continuing to offer high quality presentations at a very small fee, and we are experiencing increasing difficulty finding the space we need at McLean Hospital at the times our members would like to come. As a result of the space problem, we have been forced to schedule our Saturday morning programs quite differently than in past years. During the 2000-2001 program year, we will begin our programs promptly at 9:00 am and finish at 11:30 am so that McLean can utilize the space for a 12 noon AA meeting. We will then have our potluck brunch in an adjoining area along with announcements and a business meeting from 11:45 to 12:30. Although the time frame will be the same, it will make it more difficult for people who normally stay until the break and then leave before the discussion period. We will make every effort to make the coffee and food available throughout the program so that hungry members or those who have to leave early still have a chance to eat. We would like to invite your feedback after the first Saturday, October 14, so that we can judge how this plan is working for all of you. Our other options are to move the meetings to some other institution, to change the time to an afternoon time, to make the programs shorter, or to eliminate the brunch and therefore the chance to network and schmooze which we believe is so valued by our membership. Your thoughts and feelings about these choices are deeply appreciated!
The other challenge we face as an organization is that of making our presence better known in the mental health community. The need is certainly there: when I announced recently that I would offer a supervision group for practitioners looking for a place to discuss DID patients, I had more responses than spaces in the group. A NESTTD workshop on "Assessing and Treating Dissociation in the 21st Century" was given by Lana Epstein, Fran Grossman, Marion Shapiro, Audrey Wagner, and myself at Simmons College this past June to a very enthusiastic group of twenty mental health professionals who were clearly hungry to understand more about their challenging, frustrating, fascinating DID and DDNOS patients. Many said it was one of the best workshops they had attended on any subject. At the Trauma Center at HRI, Bessel van der Kolk and his staff will be teaching Dissociation to new trainees and fee-for-service personnel in one of the introductory lectures of a year-long didactic seminar because it is now abundantly clear that dissociation is a cardinal feature of Complex Post-traumatic Stress. It is predictable that we will encounter dissociative symptoms and fragmentation to some degree in every patient with a history of trauma. There may not always be sufficient reliance on dissociative defenses and mental organization to constitute a disorder, but most trauma patients will have a clinical picture complicated by dissociation. We hope that this coming year will be an opportunity to reach out to the mental health community as the New England Society for the Treatment of Trauma and Dissociation, an organization that is not on the fringes of the trauma treatment community or known at the "MPD Society" exclusively but is rather a place where clinicians can pursue their interest in trauma in more depth with more support from their peers. Please join us in whatever ways you can.
I hope to see you at our first meeting on October 14th!
Janina
president@nesttd.org
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