Hello! My name is Elisa Reifschneider. I am a senior Clinical Psychologist at the University of Brasília, Brazil, working mainly with suicide, crisis intervention, stress, and the development of therapeutic skills for clinical psychologists.
Together with colleagues I founded Grupo Entrelinhas, an advisory group that provides the university with a novel approach to suicide prevention planning and training. In portuguese Entrelinhas means between the lines, a nudge to the notion that suicides communicate, albeit in a tragic fashion, that which is not being ordinarily heard – nor spoken of.
My ongoing collaborations include teaching emotion regulation classes for firefighters in a specialized suicide prevention course, mental health and resilience classes for diplomats of the Brazilian Foreign Service and advisory for our state’s education department.
Building up from a social ecological worldview, I aim to integrate positive psychology and environmental psychology insights to healthcare. I feel that especially in dire circumstances we have to make use of our ingenuity and strive not only to fix what is wrong but importantly to strengthen that which drives us forward. Our immediate environment plays a big role in that.
I am a PhD in Environmental Psychology, focusing on restorative environments. I’m interested in finding out if beautiful architecture can be healing and how cities can be experienced more fully with all our senses. I have worked with Dr. Hartmut Günther at the Environmental Psychology Lab at the University of Brasília since my undergraduate studies and he was also my advisor for the doctorate. For my masters I worked with Jos Brosschot in Leiden University, studying automatic vigilance under the perseverative cognition framework for understanding stress.
I have academic and governmental research experience both at the University of Brasília and the Institute for Applied Economic Research – IPEA, helping to plot and plan research and analysing data sets.
Previously I taught neurophysiology and research methods courses for the Psychology department at the Catholic University of Brasília and I worked with human rights policy development both as a consultant for UNESCO as well as a technical analyst for the Brazilian Human Rights Special Secretariat. I was one of the main writers for the Projovem Adolescente workbooks, a nationwide project that reached over half a million young people in over 2300 municipalities in Brazil.
I am currently a member of the Brazilian Association for Suicide Prevention and Studies (ABEPS), a member of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) and an international member of the American Psychological Association (APA).
I am very interested in establishing partnerships with other researchers that touch upon these subjects. If that is your case, feel free to reach out. You can find me:
by email: psicologa.elisa@gmail.com
or on linkedin
and instagram
Escritório de Psicologia 