ESCAP President Jörg Fegert attended and presented at the "Stress & Trauma Across the Lifespan" conference in Nice on 18 November 2024. Read his event report here:
Yesterday, an event on the consequences of stress and trauma from a life-span perspective took place in the large lecture theatre of the historic Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, which was built in 1937 directly on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. A total of over 500 participants attended the event on site and online. The event was organised and run by Prof. Florence Askenazy, Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Université Cote d'Azur.
At the opening, the representatives of the city emphasised the importance of the acute intervention of the paediatric, surgical, paediatric surgical and child and adolescent psychiatric teams at the Lenval Clinic during the Islamist terrorist attack in Nice on 14 July 2016. On that day, a lorry drove into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais on the French bank holidays, killing 86 people and injuring 400, some of them seriously. As many families were walking there with their children on the evening of the French bank holidays to admire the fireworks, many children and families were particularly affected by the attack.
Even today Prof. Askenazy's team is still providing aftercare for those affected. During training, care is taken to ensure that doctors in private practice also ask where the person concerned was on 14 July 2016 in the case of various chronic symptoms, and it often turns out that traumatic experiences that have never been addressed still lead to sleep problems, etc.
The city was extremely grateful for the ongoing medical-therapeutic commitment and therefore provided this special setting for the conference. Prof. Eric Bui, former president of ISTSS, now Professor at the Université de Caen de Normandie, spoke about effective intensive and short-term treatments for adults, e.g. veterans, who could hardly be reached by normal treatment programmes. He was involved in numerous projects in the Veterans Administration in the USA during his time at Harvard.
We are delighted that Prof. Bui will be one of the excellent speakers at the ESCAP Research Academy which takes place on 27-28 June 2025 in Strasbourg. Incidentally, he is the doctoral supervisor of Alexis Revet, who organizes the Research Academy in Strasbourg together with Paul Klauser.
In my presentation, I talked about the importance of ACEs and the particular significance of cumulative stress in early childhood and then presented the latest data from a representative survey this year with an oversampling of 18-29-year-olds on sexual boundary violations and assaults on the internet.
This clearly shows how sensible the recommendation from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals SDG 16.2 is to monitor sexualised violence in the youngest generation of adults, 18 - 29 years of age, indicator SDG 16.2.3. An initial look at our results shows that almost a third of today's young adults have had stressful experiences in connection with sexualised violations of boundaries and assaults on the internet.
While the discussion about psychological stress caused by the internet among young people is often generalised and very unspecific and various studies report both negative and positive effects, in my opinion, far too little attention is paid to the fact that certain children and young people with previous exposure, e.g. through sexual abuse, are also particularly vulnerable to online dangers. Specific prevention and participatory research with young people are urgently needed here.
A concluding discussion with international guests such as Prof. Eva Alisic from the University of Melbourne and Prof. Lise Eilin Stene, Senior Medical Researcher at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies and local representatives discussed questions of acute care, rapid response, but also preparedness and the promotion of participation, with the involvement of the audience, which also included people affected on 14 July 2016.
