Why STREI?

Three medical specialists and a clinical psychologist, all specializing in physical and psychological trauma, have been collaboratively working together in various ways going back as far as 1996 in assessing and treating complex medical, psychiatric and psychological conditions.

From their combined experience with the patients they have shared over the past few years, particularly in the field of PTSD, the four specialists concluded that:

No organismic phenomenon, including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is, strictly speaking, psychological, neurological or psychiatric, but that these terms indicate different conceptual and methodological approaches with varying relevance at different stages of the disorder. However, the intricate interaction between brain, cognition, affect, and behaviour more often than not determines the eventual outcomes of both medical and psychiatric conditions. This is particularly true of PTSD.

However, in Canada, as far as we could ascertain, no university has any training program that specializes in the assessment and treatment of adult onset, especially military service related, PTSD. Indeed, most programs that provide mental health and medical training give no special consideration to adult onset PTSD and emotional trauma beyond what the text books offer.

Traditional PTSD treatment modalities and approaches with civilian and military-service related PTSD in both psychology and psychiatry require extensive review. In the fast-developing field of sleep disorders, neurological and neuropsychiatric assessment of mental health disorders, health care professionals can no longer acquire the specialist knowledge to treat Adult-onset PTSD from generalist academic approaches. Thus, the four specialists who have worked together in this field for several years, decided in June 2002 to combine their expertise by establishing the Stress and Trauma Research and Education Institute (STREI) in Hamilton, Ontario as one initiative to collect, collate, analyse and disseminate adult onset PTSD data in Canada.