Out Now! SAJP Volume 53 Issue 1: March 2023
33rd International Congress of Psychology – Prague: 21 – 26 July 2024
Inviting Message from the ICP 2024 Scientific Committee Chairs
Dear colleagues:
It is our pleasure to invite you to attend the next ICP 2024 congress which will take place in Prague July 21-26, 2024. Prague was supposed to host the ICP congress in 2020 but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICP 2020 congress was moved to the online sphere. We were then delighted that Prague has been chosen again as a host for 2024.
Prague has always been the center of commerce, culture, and knowledge. The earliest known foreign visitor to Prague, Ibrahim ibn Jakub from al-Andalus in 965 noted: “Prague is built from stone and lime and is the largest city of commerce”. Further on, Prague has always been a city which inspired: Frank Kafka wrote his novels here and Wolfgang A. Mozart appreciated: “Prague people understand me.”
The motto of ICP 2024 is “Psychology for Future: Together in Hope”. Psychologists currently face many challenges, both as professionals and citizens. It is the togetherness, combined knowledge and shared experience that makes us all stronger and able to help others.
Therefore, we would like to invite you to Prague for the upcoming ICP 2024 congress. Let us come together again after the long covid break, share our experience of overcoming crises, and jointly strengthen the grounds for hope.
Martina Klicperová – Scientific Committee Chair
Veronika Polišenská – Scientific Committee Vice-Chair
PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 3: Untangling trauma after grief and loss: Diagnostic considerations and treatment guidelines for practitioners
About this workshop:
In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic, civil unrest and devastating flooding in South Africa has meant that experiences of traumatic grief and loss are not new to our nation. COVID-19 illuminated the difficulties often facing South Africans who are grieving. Factors that complicate bereavement came to the fore: economic fallout, the instability of job security, and the monumental increase in dependency of debt to keep households running. Funerals became a staple in our public spaces. Such loss of life: Gita Ramjee, Clarence Mini, Kenneth Mthiyane, to name a few of the 101,000 deaths due to Covid-19.
This workshop aims to assist healthcare practitioners think about traumatic grief through a lens that accounts for South Africa’s complex socio-political and cultural milieu.
- Using the recent student protests as a case study, Mr Vhugala Nthakeni will provide a practitioner’s reflection on how prior traumatic experiences and a sense of loss have contributed to how we currently engage with student protests in higher education.
- Dr Cornelia Drenth will provide diagnostic considerations for grief as well as some proposals for intervention at an individual level.
- Ms Phillipa Haine will engage with how practitioners may can work with children experiencing traumatic grief within the clinical setting.
The workshop, chaired by Mr Danial Den Hollander, hopes to provide guidelines for practitioners who are faced with complex traumatic grief cases that arise from the specific historical and contemporary features of South African society.
PsySSA Workshop Series 2023: Workshop 3: Untangling trauma after grief and loss: Diagnostic considerations and treatment guidelines for practitioners
Meet our Presenters
Daniel den Hollander is a clinical psychologist who has worked in specialised mental health care, both in the public and private sectors. His expertise lies in voluntary, involuntary, and forensic treatment care, Complex PTSD and co-occuring addiction work. He has chaired the Psychology Professionals in Public Service Division of PsySSA from 2016-2021. During his term, PiPS became an established voice within parliamental NHI discussions and building key stakeholder relationships with other government departments (e.g. DBE, SARS). He is an activist for mental health care in South Africa. He is passionate about cultivating and promoting empowerment and change: may it be in the therapy room, on radio, at governmental stakeholder meetings, or at conferences. He is a regular feature on SAFM Living Redefined, and contributor for the Mail & Guardian.
Dr Nelia Drenth obtained her MA Degree (Social Work in Health) from the UP and her PhD from NWU. The title of her PhD thesis is Complicated grief in the South African context – A therapeutic intervention programme.
Dr Drenth is a peer reviewer for International Social Work, British Journal of Social Work, and has also peer reviewed articles for Health SA Gesondheid, a local online professional health care publication.
Dr Drenth is the author and/or co-author of 9 peer reviewed articles with titles related to loss, grief, and bereavement. Two of these articles have been accepted in international peer reviewed social work journals. She authored and co-authored 2 chapters in A. Herbst & G Reitman (Eds). 2016. Trauma counselling. Principles and practice in South Africa today. Cape Town: Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd.
Phillipa Haine is a registered Counselling Psychologist. Phillipa has successfully completed the degrees, BSc (Genetics, Psychology & Human Physiology) and Hons (Psychology) (Cum Laude) at Stellenbosch University, as well as the degree MA (Counselling Psychology) at Rhodes University; she completed her internship at the Rhodes University Student Counselling Centre. She is currently a PhD candidate at Rhodes University. She has a special interest in public mental health, health psychology and community based psychological interventions. Phillipa has a drive to contribute towards improving the accessibility, relevance and credibility of mental healthcare services in South Africa. Phillipa is also a part-time lecturer at Rhodes University teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and currently supervising research at a Masters level. She has published research in various peer-reviewed academic journals. Phillipa also manages a part time private practice where she predominantly works with children, adolescents and young adults.
Vhugala Nthakheni holds BCom Law and LLB qualifications from the University of the Free State and is currently the Manager: Student Life and Governance at the University of Cape Town. Vhugala has worked in the Student Affairs and services sub-sector for over 10 years.
Save the Date: HPCSA Stakeholder Engagement
27th Annual South African Psychology Congress – Congress Call
2023 CONGRESS CALL
Between Psychological Practice and Psychosocial Praxis: Southern Standpoints on Radical Hope and Healing
We are pleased to announce the upcoming conference on the theme Between Psychological Practice and Psychosocial Praxis: Southern Standpoints on Radical Hope and Healing.
Colonialism as a global system of suffering has meant that the vast majority of those in the Global South have endured unprecedented scales of psychic, material and cultural suffering. At the same time, those in the South have also practiced radical kinds of psychosocial healing that are attuned to the structural nature of colonial wounding. As such, in the context of the South, there is a rich history of radical thought and action that fuses together resistance and generativity. As central to this history, hope and healing have been interminably connected to broader social issues, contexts and processes. Today, we see the legacy of these radical iterations of hope and healing in the practices of social justice and transformative action that are attuned to the realities of the present while also striving towards and experimenting with future possibilities for emancipation.
Psychologies that root themselves in these histories of hope and healing commit to fostering the kinds of critical consciousness fundamental to catalysing transformative action from within Southern standpoints and realities. These psychologies acknowledge the socio-historical and cultural contexts of the collectives and individuals whom they endeavour to serve, and are thus in alignment with the decolonial shift that foregrounds indigenous ways of doing and knowing. It is, therefore, from within and in response to the interlocking structural crises of our moment that we find psychosocial praxes attuned to hope and healing; praxes that take seriously the inhumane histories that shape our structurally violent present and that move towards a yet-to-be realised future that recognises the flourishing of all humanity.
Deriving from the dialectics of historical and contemporary crises and apprehensions, the undeniable wounding that marks the social order, and current liberatory resurgences in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South, the 27th Annual South African Psychology Congress seeks to centre and inscribe critical and emancipatory movements, possibilities and imperatives within the science, practice and profession of psychology. The Congress Scientific Committee invites submissions from practitioners, scholars, researchers, educators, students, community organisers, activists and policymakers that engage and contribute to psychologies that are rooted in disciplinary critiques and directed towards Southern-centric articulations, applications, reflexivities and praxes. The Committee encourages both conventional and non-traditional submissions across the different areas of psychology.
The 27th Annual South African Psychology Congress will be held at Emperors Palace, Johannesburg, South Africa from the 4th to 6th October 2023.
PsySSA looks forward to receiving your submissions and to your participation in this important annual event.