Curricular training for casework in professions dealing with victims of the SED-regime – structural development

Contact person

• Mr Adrian Gallistl , Institute of Psychosocial Medicine, Psychotherapy and Psychooncology Jena University Hospital, Germany

Topic and question

The stresses and problems associated with political persecution are complex and span multiple professional fields that extend beyond the clinical field. As a result, the clinical care landscape remains dependent on practitioners from social, political and legal fields for their work. For its part, the existing clinical care landscape, with its differentiated responsibilities, is difficult for outsiders to keep track of. As a result, the entire landscape of helping services is fragmented across several unconnected professional fields, and the same applies to the existing literature.

In addition, new challenges arise due to the increasing temporal distance to the suffered SED injustice. On the one hand, new problems of older people and the issue of transgenerational transmission of burdens are coming to the fore. On the other hand, a new generation of professional helpers is emerging, who are neither familiar with the special historical contexts nor with the existing specialist literature.

Finally, political traumatization in the GDR has the particularity that this subject is located close to polarizing socio-political discussions, which makes a differentiated reflection of socio-psychological and sociological effects necessary in the field of clinical help.

The aim of the subproject is to support professional helpers of different disciplines by developing clinical-scientific further education modules. The prerequisite for this is the network-oriented inclusion of already existing relevant expertise and existing support structures.

Methodic procedure

The following three modules are planned in cooperation with the coordination, other subprojects of the network and with network partners. The three modules roughly correspond to chronological focal points of the three project years, since the three modules increasingly presuppose first network results and networking with cooperation partners:

1. Literature database and reviews: Relevant clinical and psychosocial literature and multimedia will be collected, grouped and summarized in a database. The review will be made available to the professional public. In addition, the pooling of research status is encouraged through support for review papers and focus issues.
2. Curricular training: In addition to and in cooperation with already existing continuing education structures and offers, continuing education curricula are developed, tested in a pilot run and evaluated. These consist of different modules. The modular concept makes it possible to compile further adapted sub-curricula for different occupational groups, including those that have received little attention to date.
3. Long-term needs analysis: On the basis of existing literature, ongoing surveys and evaluations of pilot curricula, urgent training needs and content for continuous training work in the network are identified.