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Professor Maja Lis-Turlejska, PhD
SWPS University Professor, Chair of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural Psychology
For many years, she had worked at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw. She has been studying the issue of traumatic stress for over 30 years. At the beginning, she studied ways for coping with extreme trauma in former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. At the later stage of her career, she focused on analysing PTSD distribution in Poland.
She is an author and an editor of several books, including: “Nowe kierunki w psychoterapii” (New Directions in Psychotherapy) (1979), “Nowe zjawiska w psychoterapii” (New Phenomena in Psychotherapy) (1991), “Traumatyczny stres: Koncepcje i badania” (Traumatic Stress: Concepts and ) (1998), “Stres traumatyczny: Występowanie, następstwa, terapia” (Traumatic stress: Occurrence, consequences, therapy) (2002) and “Traumatyczne zdarzenia i ich skutki psychiczne” (Traumatic events and their mental consequences) (2005). She also published dozens of scientific papers in renowned Polish and foreign psychotraumatology journals. She established the Polish Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (PTBST) and was its chairman in 2006–2016. From 2007 to 2013 she was a board member of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS).
Why is the PTSD level so high in Poland?
We study why so many people in Poland suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our studies show that nearly 19% of Poles may have this disorder. Early analyses among Poles who survived World War II suggest that about 29–39% of them could have PTSD, and this is a much higher result when compared to citizens of other European countries.
Long-term studies conducted by Professor Maja Lis-Turlejska found that Poles frequently did not experience a social recognition of their traumatic experiences from World War II. We analyse whether this lack of social recognition could affect mental health of successive generations of Poles through intergenerational transmission of trauma from that period. Can this explain the high PTSD level in Poland?
