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In the spring of 2020, much of the world was struggling to cope with the challenges of the quarantines imposed in the face of the exploding COVID-19 pandemic that emerged the previous winter. Every facet of our lives could be affected, although not similarly or equally for us all, and we were filled with a sense of danger and fear with little knowledge about the virus or its treatment. As mental health professionals who possess skills in treating psychic trauma, we were faced with a new challenge, that of addressing complex trauma in our patients as we were in the throes of it ourselves. PSC has previously published an issue dedicated to an exploration of these issues [16:3]: “When the World Shifted: The Impact of the Pandemic on Practice, Theory and Culture.”
IAPSP soon realized it would not be possible to hold our annual conference in the fall of 2020. A committee was quickly convened to plan an online conference that soon became three regional conferences, each highlighting the work of participants from different regions of the world. The format would be a case presentation followed by spontaneous or invited discussions. We entitled the series “A Challenging Treatment in Challenging Times,” a title that encompassed both the sociopolitical context in which each treatment was conducted and the emergence of the pandemic in our consulting rooms. Estelle Shane chaired the Conference of the Americas; Eldad Iddan, the Conference of Europe, the Mideast and South Africa; and Koichi Togashi and Josh White the Conference of the Pacific Rim. We were on a steep technological learning curve. We wanted to reach our international members living in multiple time zones whose mother tongue wasn’t English, and thus the presentations needed to be translated simultaneously into multiple languages. We found a company with the needed expertise, and each conference was broadly attended by clinicians from around the globe. We are able to publish papers from the first two online conferences