Andreas Maercker

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Andreas Maercker (born 26 April 1960) is a German clinical psychologist and international expert in traumatic stress-related mental disorders who works in Switzerland. He also contributed to lifespan and sociocultural aspects of trauma sequelae, e.g. the Janus-Face model of posttraumatic growth. Recently, he has been increasingly engaged in cultural clinical psychology.

Contents

Biography

Andreas Maercker studied medicine and psychology in East Germany. He graduated as M.D. in 1986 at the Humboldt University of Berlin. From 1988 to 1989 he was a political prisoner in the GDR for ten months due to an escape attempt to the Federal Republic (sentenced to two years in prison and earlier "redeemed" by the Federal Republic of Germany). In 1995 he graduated as Ph.D. with a study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin supervised by psychologist Paul B. Baltes. In 1999, he became a psychology professor at TU Dresden. Since 2005, he holds the chair of Psychopathology and Clinical Intervention at the University of Zurich. Since 2011, he has chaired the working group "Stress-associated disorders" for ICD-11 revision by World Health Organization. [1] In 1998, he co-founded the German language Society for Psychotraumatology (Deutschsprachige Gesellschaft für Psychotraumatologie) and served as its president. [2] In 2017, he also co-founded the European Association for Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment (EACLIPT) and serves as its secretary. [3] Starting in 2017, he is chairperson of the commission "Instrumentalization of Psychology in the GDR" of the German Psychological Society on Stasi psychology. [4]

Work

International contributions of his work are a new diagnosis model of adjustment disorder, the introduction of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and prolonged grief disorder to ICD-11. In PTSD research he developed assessments of socio-interpersonal risk and protective factors: "Disclosure of trauma questionnaire (Dysfunctional disclosure)", [5] "Social acknowledgement as victim", [6] and "Revised Sense of Coherence Scale" [7] that had been translated into Polish, Bahasia Indonesian, and Chinese. Based on these factors he developed the "Social interpersonal model of PTSD". [8] This model posits that social and interpersonal factors play a more central role than biological factors or memory-related alterations. Currently, the model gets extended into cultural factors relevant to PTSD (e.g. values, scripts). [9] With regard to lifespan consequences of trauma he developed the "Janus-Face-Model of posttraumatic growth" [10] (together with Tanja Zöllner). This model differentiates previous uniformly positive models of post-traumatic growth. [11] [12] Other models of mental disorder or phenomena development concern, e.g. the "motivational reserve" (parallel to cognitive reserve) [13] (with S. Forstmeier) of older people which is based on life and learning history resources and is assumed to temporarily compensate for a dementia-induced reduction in intelligence and general abilities. [14] In intervention research, he was one of the early developers of Internet interventions for posttraumatic stress, prolonged grief disorder, adjustment disorder in German language and other languages. [15] [16] In 2020, he was among the 'Highly Cited Researchers' of the year, recognized annually by Web of Science for their exceptional research performance.

In cultural clinical psychology, two topics were in the foreground: the "cultural scripts of trauma sequelae" and "historical trauma" according to the concept of Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart. For the Global North, these cultural scripts of trauma sequelae are largely congruent with the codified diagnoses of PTSD and Complex PTSD. A parallel study using emic and etic methods, ongoing since 2022, analyzes cultural scripts of trauma sequelae in Switzerland, Rwanda, Georgia, China, and Israel. Historical trauma is operationalized as individual and especially socio-psychological long-term effects, perpetuated by discrimination or marginalization of victims and their subsequent generations. In this area, he and colleagues are conducting comparative studies of trauma in different regions of the world (e.g. [17] ).

Awards

Main international publications

See also

List of recipients of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. ↑ "GCP Network". GCP Network. Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  2. ↑ "DeGPT · Über die DeGPT". DeGPT · Startseite (in German). Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  3. ↑ "The European Association of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Treatment". 22 July 2002. Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  4. ↑ Maercker, Andreas; Guski-Leinwand, Susanne (2018). "Psychologists' involvement in repressive "Stasi" secret police activities in former East Germany". International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation. 7 (2): 107–119. doi:10.1037/ipp0000085.
  5. ↑ Original in German. Engl. transl.: Müller, Mörgeli & Maercker (2008). Disclosure and social acknowledgement as predictors of recovery from posttraumatic stress: A longitudinal study in crime victims. Canadian Journ Psychiatry, 53, 160-168.
  6. ↑ Maercker, A. & J. Müller, J. (2004) Social acknowledgment as a victim or survivor: A scale to measure a recovery factor of PTSD. In: Journal of Traumatic Stress, 17, 345–351.
  7. ↑ Bachem, Rahel; Maercker, Andreas (22 April 2016). "Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Revised Sense of Coherence Scale". European Journal of Psychological Assessment. Hogrefe Publishing Group. 34 (3): 206–215. doi:10.1027/1015-5759/a000323. ISSN   1015-5759. S2CID   146876673.
  8. ↑ Maercker, Andreas; Horn, Andrea B. (22 June 2012). "A Socio-interpersonal Perspective on PTSD: The Case for Environments and Interpersonal Processes". Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy. Wiley-Blackwell. 20 (6): 465–481. doi:10.1002/cpp.1805. ISSN   1063-3995. PMID   22730216.
  9. ↑ Maercker, Andreas (2017). Trauma und Traumafolgestörungen (in German). München: Verlag C.H. Beck. ISBN   978-3-406-69850-7.
  10. ↑ Maercker, A. & Zöllner, T. (2004). The Janus face of posttraumatic growth: Towards a two component model of posttraumatic growth. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 41–48.
  11. ↑ Haas, Michaela (2015). Bouncing forward : transforming bad breaks into breakthroughs. New York: Enliven Books. ISBN   978-1-5011-1512-7.
  12. ↑ Tedeschi, Richard (1995). Trauma & transformation : growing in the aftermath of suffering. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications. ISBN   978-0-8039-5257-7.
  13. ↑ Forstmeier, S. & Maercker, A. (2008). Motivational reserve: Lifetime motivational abilities contribute to cognitive and emotional health in old age. In: Psychology and Aging. 23, 886–899.
  14. ↑ Build brainpower to slow Alzheimer's (2007, June 11). USA Today, p. 8.
  15. ↑ Wang, Zhiyun; Wang, Jianping; Maercker, Andreas (30 September 2013). "Chinese My Trauma Recovery, A Web-Based Intervention for Traumatized Persons in Two Parallel Samples: Randomized Controlled Trial". Journal of Medical Internet Research. JMIR Publications Inc. 15 (9): e213. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2690 . ISSN   1438-8871. PMC   3815433 . PMID   24080137.
  16. ↑ Brunet, Alain (2010). Internet use in the aftermath of trauma. Amsterdam Washington, DC: IOS Press. pp. 255–267. ISBN   978-1-60750-626-3.
  17. ↑ Maercker, A. (2023) How to deal with the past? How collective and historical trauma psychologically reverberates in Eastern Europe. In: Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14:1228785, doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1228785.
  18. ↑ "Award Ceremony 2017". Dr. Margrit Egnér-Stiftung (in German). Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  19. ↑ "ESTSS Awards at the 15th ESTSS Conference 2017 in Odense, Denmark". 1 April 2017. Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  20. ↑ Maercker, Andreas; Brewin, Chris R.; Bryant, Richard A.; Cloitre, Marylene; van Ommeren, Mark; Jones, Lynne M.; Humayan, Asma; Kagee, Ashraf; Llosa, Augusto E.; Rousseau, Cécile; Somasundaram, Daya J.; Souza, Renato; Suzuki, Yuriko; Weissbecker, Inka; Wessely, Simon C.; First, Michael B.; Reed, Geoffrey M. (2013). "Diagnosis and classification of disorders specifically associated with stress: proposals for ICD-11" (PDF). World Psychiatry. Wiley-Blackwell. 12 (3): 198–206. doi:10.1002/wps.20057. ISSN   1723-8617. PMC   3799241 . PMID   24096776.
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