President's Report for 2018

2018 was another busy year for the Aftermath Foundation. It was a year in which we continued to invest heavily in providing information about psychopathy through our website. It was also a year in which our organization grew and in which we continued to invest in long-term projects to help us serve you better.

With respect to new information, a lot of our accomplishments are summarized in our list of 2018 accomplishments. In addition to adding a video describing tips for people who might be in relationships with people with psychopathic traits, we added several summaries of recent scientific articles about psychopathy. Our volunteers continue to believe that the best way for everyone to survive and to thrive is to understand more about the nature of people with psychopathic traits – including how they are likely to appear and behave – and how to protect oneself from manipulation and assault.

As mentioned in our 2016-2017 report, our volunteers have done a great deal of work on the website over the past few years. In 2018, as we learned about the need to make the website more secure, we converted the website to secure socket layer technology (which means we switched from “http://” to “https://”). In fact, we have discovered that this transfer was more complicated than we realized, and it is only recently (in 2019) that we feel confident that our website is secure.  

If you have not visited the website in a while, I encourage you to take a look! In addition to the slightly updated look of the website (Thank you, Paula Reichwald!), we have added quite a bit of content. For a more detailed look at what has happened on the website during 2018, please click here.

Online Courses to Educate the General Public and Professionals
We continued to work hard on developing online courses, and we decided in 2018 to focus on developing two distinct courses:  one course for the general public -- to help educate people about the nature and impact of people with psychopathic traits -- and another course that is designed for mental health professionals who want to work with victims and survivors -- to help them to be more effective in helping people to recover and get their lives back. Although it will be possible for psychologists and counselors to obtain Continuing Education credits for completing these courses, the first course will also be available for free to anyone who wants to learn more about what psychopathic people are really like. We feel strongly that education is the best way to protect oneself!

At the end of 2019 we finally launched our Kickstarter campaign to raise money to build these courses. Please visit our Kickstarter page. We are hoping to be able to report a successful campaign in our 2019 annual report! We are also excited about the artists who agreed to donate the images from some of their paintings to make great tee shirts and coffee mugs, and we hope you will like these too.

We also held an additional Web Conversation with psychopathy expert Dr. Angela Book, in 2018. We thank the members of the Foundation who joined us for this conversation. We plan to share it with you early in 2020. And we hope to have additional web conversations with psychopathy experts in 2020.

New Volunteers
As mentioned above, the number of volunteers helping the Foundation continued to grow in 2018. We were joined by a variety of psychopathy experts and psychopathy survivors, including several European researchers who are helping us be more helpful to victims and survivors in Europe. Among other things, some of our new volunteers have begun to translate material on our website into new languages. We know that people with psychopathic traits hurt other people all over the world, and, if you know any other languages (or know someone who does), I encourage you to help us to spread accurate information about psychopathy all over the world.

 

New Membership Structure
Finally, I want to note that we spent much of 2018 working on developing a new membership structure. This was another long-term project that is scheduled for completion in early 2020. It will soon be possible to join the Foundation as a member at three different levels.

 

Our Fundraising Committee worked hard in 2018 to develop perks of membership that we think you will like, and we hope that these will give you one more incentive to support us at the highest level that you can. Under the new plan, you will be able to join as a Regular Member, as a Silver Member, or as a Gold Member; you can view the membership options on our “Become a Member” page or by visiting the Aftermath Foundation Store. One of the most exciting of these Member Benefits is access to our “Members Only” page that will contain additional information about psychopathy as well as providing a place for Members to communicate with Aftermath Foundation volunteers about how to make the Foundation more useful to you.

Help Committee
The Help Committee remained active in 2018, fielding 64 requests for help of various kinds. We continue to receive requests from people around the world, and we do our best to make referrals. Because we still do not know psychopathy experts in every country, we also welcome new suggestions of professionals who understand this severe personality disorder and who are open to helping victims and survivors. You can read more about the work of the Help Committee here.

As we enter the new year, I want to personally thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

Dave Kosson

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