Ilanit Hasson-Ohayon is Associate Professor and co-director of community clinic at the Department of Psychology of the Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She did a lot of research into psychiatric rehabilitation, on themes as coping with mental illnesses, insight, meta-cognition, self-stigma. She also worked on the evaluation of psycho-social interventions and psychotherapy in psychiatric rehabilitation.

In the last year me and my family had the great opportunity to live in the Netherlands, spending my academic sabbatical in Groningen university and living in Amsterdam. We had a wonderful time living in Amsterdam which has a large expat community and few international schools. We enjoyed the life style of biking and even got used to biking when it is freezing outside. I had the privilege of working with professionals in Groningen, Amsterdam and Utrecht and to learn about mutual academic and clinical interests. Notably, the topic of fighting stigma is beyond countries and it is exciting to see efforts being taken to reduce stigma in different places in the world. 

One of the projects I was working on during my stay in the Netherlands involved the implementation and examination of the Narrative Enhancement and Cognitive Therapy (NECT) for the reduction of self-stigma. This intervention was developed by Phil Yanos from New-York, David Roe from Israel and Paul Lysaker from Indiana, and was implemented and examined in different countries in the States and in Europe. As self-stigma is one of the major sources of distress for persons with mental illness, reducing it is an important challenge. I took part in some NECT projects in Israel as a facilitator, trainer and researcher and was very enthusiastic to do the same in the Netherlands.

The NECT is a weekly group intervention that last approximately 24 sessions. It is usually facelifted by two professionals and includes various therapeutic interventions (e.g. CBT, narrative) that aim to increase a positive sense of identity which is not stigmatized.

Working together with Jaap van Weeghel and his colleagues, we established a group of professionals who are interested in the intervention and started to prepare the condition for the first NECT trial in the Netherlands. Currently there are eight organizations that like to participate and we hope that each will establish a group of at least 10 participants. We will use appropriate scales to assess the effectiveness of the intervention and we welcome students who like to take part in the research aspects of the project. I am looking forward to continue working on this together with Jaap and his colleagues after going back to Israel.