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The Brisbane Group held its inaugural meeting on 11 April 2005. It was attended by 37 professionals from diverse backgrounds, but predominantly psychologists and social workers. The group meets monthly and has a basic three-year plan. The first year has been devoted to acquiring a sufficient grasp of the neuroscience concepts and a vocabulary essential for a critical reading of some of the relevant literature. Thus prepared, the second year will be devoted to working through some of the significant recent neuroscience and neuro-psychoanalytic literature that is of direct relevance to professionals working in the areas of infant mental health, early development and trauma, and child protection. By the third year we expect to have a sufficient foundation to develop our own research ideas and projects, which will be predominantly practitioner-based. Our format for the first year was a video-showing of Mark Solms's lectures on “The Brain for Beginners,” followed by discussions based also on extracts from The Brain and the Inner World (Solms & Turnbull, 2002). We plan to continue with the works of Jaak Panksepp, Allan N. Schore, Peter Fonagy, and others. Our focus and long-term aim is prevention: where prevention fails, the development of effective evidence-based and cost-effective, treatment guidelines is important
It is our intention that the study group should function as a peer support group and also encourage and support members who wish to undertake their own research. It will provide a secure base for the exploration of ideas and the development of a professional practice that is evidence-based. It is important to us that the group be as inclusive as possible, having the widest possible composition and representing as many professions as possible. We expect that numbers may drop as we move beyond the educational phase of the first year, but we feel this educational function to be vital in terms both of providing ourselves with secure foundations and of providing mu