Anselm Crombach appointed Professor of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology and Psychotherapy

The following text has been machine translated from the German with no human editing.

Anselm Crombach’s work centres on the effects of violence and stressful life experiences on the mental health of children, young people and families. A particular focus is on how traumatic experiences, shame, social exclusion and family stress contribute to the intergenerational transmission of violence. At the same time, he and his team are developing and investigating psychotherapeutic and preventive approaches to break such cycles of violence. This is because the social, health and economic costs resulting from these cycles of violence far exceed the expenditure required for prevention and early intervention. In contrast, psychotherapeutic care for children and young people is inadequate both globally and in Germany. In particular, children who have experienced violence have so far been reached only to a limited extent.

Anselm Crombach’s projects have taken him to Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa and Uganda, amongst other places. There, he and his local colleagues worked with people who had experienced or perpetrated violence. Since 2021, Anselm Crombach has been leading, as a junior professor, the establishment of the ‘ ’ University Outpatient Clinic for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy at Saarland University. This clinic already plays a central role in the training of trainee psychotherapists. In future, the University Outpatient Clinic is intended to serve as a central platform for transferring scientific findings directly into clinical care and training.

At Saarland University, Anselm Crombach aims to establish an internationally recognised centre of excellence for research, teaching and knowledge transfer focusing on cycles of violence, trauma-related disorders and aggressive behaviour across developmental stages. His aim is to develop prevention and intervention strategies, test them scientifically and apply them across different healthcare systems – from the university outpatient clinic through the German healthcare system to (post-)conflict regions. In light of global crises, armed conflicts, refugee movements and climate-related uncertainties, this also entails a social responsibility to combine internationally relevant and practice-oriented research with training in the field of child and adolescent psychotherapy. Students should therefore be introduced at an early stage, in a research-oriented manner, to the evidence-based diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders in childhood and adolescence.

Short biography of Anselm Crombach

After studying Psychology at Philipps University of Marburg, Anselm Crombach moved to the University of Konstanz in 2010. There, he completed his PhD in the Clinical Psychology and Clinical Neuropsychology research group and subsequently established his research focus on the effects of violence on trauma-related disorders and aggressive behaviour in conflict regions. At the same time, he taught and conducted research at the Université Lumière de Bujumbura in Burundi and set up a research consortium with the non-governmental organisations vivo international e.V. and Psychologues sans Frontières Burundi. In addition, he obtained his licence to practise as a psychological psychotherapist and gained further qualifications in the psychotherapeutic treatment of children and adolescents. Between 2020 and 2023, he coordinated a project on the treatment and prevention of gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in which more than 8,600 trauma therapy sessions were carried out. Since 2021, Anselm Crombach has been an assistant professor at Saarland University.