Dear friends and members of ISST:

I’m writing these words towards the end of 2014, a year in which we had a wonderful conference (see the summary of Istanbul 2014 here), and in which yet more exciting research about the efficacy, mechanisms, and wide reach of schema therapy has come to light. Thanks to the great work of Travis Atkinson and Eckhard Roediger, our organization also has this new website. As the board coordinator for research and science, I’m hoping to see us put the website to use in a few different ways.

First, starting this month, we will have the authors of exciting new research projects tell us, in plain language, about their findings. In the inaugural blog post,  Dr. Neele Reiss tells us that we have come a long way since the anecdotal finding in the clinical literature that inpatient treatment may be harmful for patients with BPD. In her brief summary, Neele (lead author of a recent report on three pilot studies testing inpatient schema therapy) tells us about the development, and empirical status, of this exciting mode of delivering schema therapy to patients with BPD.

In the following months, we will have similar contributions from the growing community of schema therapy researchers, worldwide. If you’d like to highlight a study you are involved in, please let me know by emailing me: ESHKOL

Second, we now have a reconstituted research committee: I’m very grateful to the members who have agreed to serve on this committee. The committee will help generate some of the blog posts, noted above. It will also blindly review the submissions for the next ISST conference, providing the program committee with feedback that will help ensure yet another wonderful meeting.

Third, we encourage all those interested in research questions to subscribe to the SchemaSociety google group. This listserv covers clinical and administrative issues, but often serves as a vibrant forum for research related conversations, both applied and basic.

One change you’ll notice from the older versions of the Society’s website is the absence of the Publications listing. With the exciting growth in the number of ST related publications, we have found that the best way to keep them at our finger tips is actually through widely-available search (such as scholar.google.com) and social-networking sites (such as researchgate.net). Our plan is to keep an updated list of books and articles (which are often less easy to find on Google Scholar); when looking for peer-reviewed articles, it is now easier (and more informative) to use these free and widely-available search options.

Happy holidays, and stay tuned for more updates in the coming months, as we prepare the call-for-papers for the 2016 conference.

Eshkol Rafaeli

Contact Eshkol at: EMAIL