Dear Colleagues and Fellow Members of ESTD,
I hope that the year 2021 has started well for you and that it will bring hope and new beginnings!
It is with great pleasure that I am writing my first letter as the new President of ESTD. The next two years promise to be full of challenges for our association, and I look forward to supporting the development of new projects.
Before going any further, I would like to pay tribute to Anca Sabau, who has just completed her term as President of our association. I would like to thank her warmly for her commitment and the work she has done over the past two years to ensure the continuity and smooth running of ESTD. At the same time, I would like to thank our former President, Andrew Moskowitch, who is completing his term of office on the ESTD board after 8 years of dedicated service, and Tom Horemans, our Treasurer, who retired from the Board in February 2021. Tom was replaced at a moment’s notice by Desiree Tijdink, who will now become our new Treasurer, and we will soon be issuing a call for applications to replace Andrew and Anabel Gonzales, who will also be leaving the Board this year.
2020 will long be remembered for the many upheavals that the COVID-19 crisis has brought about. Our organisation was not spared, and we had to make the decision to cancel our conference scheduled for Autumn 2021 in Manchester, UK. Fortunately, 2020 also brought some good news: the ESTD’s scientific journal, launched in 2017 jointly with the AFTD, is a great success and is gaining recognition for the quality of its articles. As a result, our journal has just been referenced in Scopus, Elsevier’s database of some 25,000 scientific journals. Cyril Tarquinio, our Chief Editor, hopes that the same will soon be true for PsycINFO, Pubmed/Medline and Web of Science. As a reminder, the ESTD journal is directly accessible to our members via our website: How to access the ESTD Journal | ESTD.
As the new President, my first role will be to relaunch our association’s projects. Therefore, I am pleased to announce that the next ESTD conference will be held in Brussels, from 13 to 15 October 2022. Please note the date in your diary! We hope that the conference will be able to take place on-site, but we will provide for the possibility of taking part in online conferences and workshops.
For those who don’t want to wait until 2022 to continue learning and discussing the subjects that interest us, we have an exciting project for this year, 2021. The ESTD research committee will set up a series of expert discussions around the diagnosis and assessment of Dissociation. The research committee has identified a series of themes and concepts that lack clarity and provoke discussion, both scientifically and clinically. For each theme, the ESTD research committee will invite experts to take stock of the current state of knowledge in the field and to discuss their different points of view. Discussions will be held online and, as a member of ESTD, you will be invited to participate. You will receive practical information as soon as the programme has been finalised.
Together with the ESTD education committee, we also have plans to develop the online training offer and to subtitle these courses in different European languages. As President, I am particularly keen to offer training opportunities for young mental health practitioners and researchers. I think it is very important to facilitate access to relevant information and good practice for students and young professionals.
In conclusion, on behalf of the ESTD Board, I would like to thank you for the trust and support you continue to show in us. We are committed to doing our best to represent you and advance the thoughts and ideas we hold dear.
Raphaël Gazon
ESTD President