Statement Regarding Katie Keech and the ISSTD Board Departure

Over the last few years, several colleagues and community members have asked about a public statement published by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) regarding my departure from the Board of Directors. Because information on the internet is permanent, and because the organization’s statement contains numerous factual inaccuracies that have since been fully debunked, I am sharing the objective reality of what occurred to provide clarity and set the record straight.

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The True Context of My Departure

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My removal from the ISSTD Board followed a series of internal governance failures, ideological friction, and a stark lack of institutional curiosity regarding community volunteerism.

• Community Volunteerism: The primary catalyst for the Board’s actions was my volunteer work in the San Francisco Bay Area. Through my involvement with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (a long-standing LGBTQ+ community advocacy group), I worked alongside an individual who led recovery meetings (AA/NA) for The Satanic Temple. 

• Proactive Transparency: Contrary to the assertion that I hid this association, I took deliberate safety precautions to protect ISSTD's interests before proactively bringing the matter to the Board's attention and offering to facilitate a meeting. Instead of open communication, the leadership responded with immediate expulsion.

• Ideological Friction: The individual in question was not hostile toward individuals with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). In fact, upon learning about the aggressive, anti-therapeutic activities of certain factions within their own organization, they chose to leave it. This lack of hostility of this individual towards dissociation and the DID area of study in general was even confirmed by TST publicly themselves. My removal took place shortly after I directly confronted leadership regarding problematic training materials that mocked a patient who had tragically died by suicide in an NHS facility.

• This training created a great upset in the lived experience community and people requested an apology. There never was one. Instead the presentation was then presented by The McLean Hospital in a Grand Rounds that was public on YouTube  which cause an even larger distress in the lived experience community and sowed huge distrust in the very people that were previously looked up to in the field on DID and OSDD. As a response there was a very large petition signed by over 3k people asking for repair and even An Infinite Mind put out a statement  by their board denouncing the training and discussing the damage it caused. 

• To this day there has been no apology.  

• ​It has been brought to my attention that no board member is allowed to talk to me without signing a restrictive COI first. I have not been allowed to even talk to the board about my side of the story which is against the Code of Conduct. I pointed this out and received in writing that they were using "different rules". I asked for a copy of these rules and the only response I got was that " I had already received them" - but I had not. And it is not ok to have secret rules that are not applicable to the entirety of membership. 

• ​I am aware, as I saw it in person and have a screen shot, that the past president was slandering me by publicly telling people in a clinical group called DISSOC that I was connected with false memory foundation individuals. Though Salter did not name me directly when he posted the claim, many people immediately knew he was referring to me and some pushed back on this assertion of his as false. He was reprimanded by the moderators of the listserv community. 

• ​My complaint to the ISSTD about his behavior resulted in simply a three sentence paragraph saying that they found he did nothing wrong with no outline suggesting there was any actual investigation on his behavior at all. The reply was not even sent to me on letter head. 

• I was told that I would not be able to attend a conference I was suppose to present at  in early 2023 nor even remain a member if I did not sign an NDA. I refused to sign it. The conference money was never refunded to me, this demand was never stated in their public statement about me. They falsely stated I would be allowed to rejoin in six months after this letter was emailed to me. They told an attendee, who asked about their request for me to sign an NDA at the conference, that this was all for my own good. 

Correcting the Record on Legal Threats and Mediation

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The ISSTD’s statement claims that I immediately threatened to sue the organization. This is demonstrably false and contradicted by written email records:

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• I notified the leadership that I was consulting with an attorney solely due to ongoing, volatile hostility from the organization’s president, which included verbal aggression during a mediation I requested that only included Mary Pat Hanlin and Lisa Danychuck, no outside mediators witnessed the meeting but the aggression was witnessed by other leadership. Salter kept stating that I had boundary issues. In this meeting. Lisa asked him explicitly what they were and he responded that he had nothing to say about it. But then later continued to repeat this when I got upset and called for legal support. 

• I have never desired litigation. When I later filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), my explicit remedy request was mediation that would lead to a simple apology and a reinstatement. This would have been at no cost to ISSTD had they taken it up, but they chose not to. 

• ​Instead they went with investigation which likely cost membership, at minimum 30k. This was entirely unnecessary and cut into the membership budget substantually.

• The president at the time of this investigation, Peter Maeves, did deign to talk to me, he did report he did not agree with it and that he found that there were falsehoods being spread about me, but did not feel that he had power to oppose this. I have copies of these correspondences in email. I also have witnesses who said he apologized to them about the situation with me at a conference.  

Exploitation of Privacy and Misrepresentation

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In an effort to construct a narrative of instability, the ISSTD’s public statement weaponized and misframed my personal diagnosis. The statement implied that this information was hidden from the organization. In reality, my diagnosis had been openly and documented as discussed with the entire Executive Committee and the CFO well before these events transpired.

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Following my removal, the organization demanded I sign a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), which I refused. They subsequently offered to remove their defamatory online statement, but only on the condition that I sign a restrictive non-disparagement agreement. I chose to decline. My voice, my integrity, and the truth of what occurred are not tools to be bartered for an organization's public relations damage control.

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Moving Forward

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Prior to these events, I dedicated years of intense, passionate service to the ISSTD. I was deeply honored to be named a Fellow of the society just one week before my removal. During my tenure, I:

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• Founded and built three distinct Special Interest Groups (SIGs).

• Led the clinical team that created the Transition Age Youth (TAY) Guidelines.

• Headed the fundraising committee and served on the Executive Committee as Secretary.

• ​Rapid Response Committee ( where I wrote the the entirety of the Floyd response that was later edited)

• Code of conduct Committee where I wrote the progressive discipline structure, which I later subsequently pointed out was not being utilized per code on me. 

While some past leadership has expressed confusion and dismay over the handling of my departure, I view this chapter as closed.

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My work continues to be rooted in the deep, relational healing of trauma and dissociation—treating human souls as whole, complex beings rather than functional components in a machine. I am immensely proud of my career, my community advocacy in the Bay Area, and the unwavering boundary I drew to protect my own dignity.

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