GLIPS was represented at this meeting by your two Representates, Michael Schwartz, MD and Deborah Weisbrot, MD.

Election of Assembly Officers:

Recorder: Bruce A. Hershfield, MD
Speaker Elect: Gary Weinstein, MD

In contrast to the prior APA assembly meeting in November, 2008, this meeting was marked by less substantive action papers. In fact, there seemed to be an enormous amount of quibbling about the most relatively minor of these papers, a 5 word mission statement, which is more of a slogan that a mission statement and whether the modernistic caduceus symbol from the Healthy Minds campaign should replace the current Benjamin Rush insignia of the APA. The mission statement proposal which has evoked an enormous amount of debate and which was eventually tabled is: “The American Psychiatric Association: Helping Psychiatrists Help Patients”. One argument was that it should be Helping Psychiatric Physicians Help Patients” another was that this is a tag line, not a mission statement. This led to endless varieties of debate about not only the tagline itself but the importance of it, etc. The motion failed.  

With regard to the enormity of time and debate on these issues, Herb Peyser said it best when he commented that he thinks that the APA may have stumbled upon the following profound mathematical formulation:

The amount of time and effort spent on a matter in a deliberative body is greatly in inverse relationship to the significance of the matter.

One aspect of the meeting which was highlighted and which we feel is critical to emphasize is the importance of understanding that the APA is a politically active organization championing our issues at the legislative level. Consequently, it is crucial to become a member of APA-PAC, our political action organization. At this point, only a minority of APA members recognize the necessity of this.

A sampling of some of the Action Papers included the following from each Committee:  
Reference Committee 1-Advocating for Patients
• A proposal to investigate the need to develop a committee on Men’s Mental Health carried. Request that the APA create a Task Force to investigate the unmet psychiatric needs of men and boys that is analogous to the Committee on Women.
• Facilitating Psychiatric Consultation to Primary Care Physicians: Intent- Encouraging DBS to facilitate the provision of psychiatric Consultation to primary care physicians. This passed, although it provided no suggestions for how to actually carry this out except that the APA should assign DB grants a high priority to funding administrative support for this initiative.

Reference Committee 2-Advocating for the Profession
• Increasing MIT Membership in the APA at the PGY1 level carried-medical students matching into psychiatry should be contacted by a local MIT AOA representative near their residency in order to begin a new membership or renew their previous membership in the APA.
• ECP Membership Retention Strategies: Offer incentives to retain MIT members

Reference Committee 3-Supporting Education/Training/Career Development
• Pregnancy and Parental Leave during Psychiatric Residency Training-To support psychiatric residents during pregnancy, parental leave and after return to work-carried. Among several items, this Action paper states that the APA should adopt a policy and develop a position statement that supports that “residents should return to their previous position with no loss if residency status (i.e. no need to repeat previously completed training time or decrease in PGY level) -- this was controversial.

Reference Committee 4-Defining/Supporting Professional Values
• US Congress’ use of the term “mental defective”-carried-to ask the US Congress to remove the term “mental defective” from US Code as a way of referring to persons who have experienced certain mental health problems.
• Conflicts of Interest in Ethics Committee Assignments: That Concurrent appointment of one individual to a district branch or state association Ethics Committee and a state board of medical licensure poses potential problems of de facto breaches of the integrity and confidentiality of the entire investigative and adjudication process.  

One of the more interesting discussions had to do with the report from the Task Force on Assembly-Board Relations, the goal of which is to increase the influence of the Assembly on the decisions of the Board of Trustees and to consider some sort of power sharing of the Board with the Assembly. The changes to be considered include having the decision of the BOT will be presented at each Assembly and having the budget will be distributed to the Assembly. The most controversial suggestion was having a small group evaluate the effect and impact of these additional interactions between the leadership of the Board and the Assembly.

Remember: you can access the complete agenda of the Assembly meeting on the APA website, by going to the Members Corner and finding the section on meetings. This information is posted at the time of the meeting. Under the section called, “APA At A Glance”, you can access all sorts of information relevant to the Assembly. There is a new website format which is designed much better than the prior one.

We will be back in Washington in November, representing you and GLIPS. Let us know if there are issues or problems on your mind that we can bring before the Assembly in the form of an Action Paper.