The American Psychiatric Excellence Awards: An ‘Orange Tie’ Event

When I began my APA presidency, one of my visions was that APA would host an annual event to recognize some of the amazing individuals across the country who are dedicating their lives to helping patients with mental illness. That vision has now become a reality.

On April 18 we will host the inaugural American Psychiatric Excellence (APEX) Awards at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. Our intent is for the APEX Awards dinner to be the premier annual mental health event focusing on a different theme every year. The inaugural event will focus on the important issue of how to decrease the large number of mentally ill individuals who have been incarcerated. Roughly two million people with serious mental illness are incarcerated in our jails each year.

I am excited to announce that the evening’s emcee will be Cokie Roberts, renowned author and political journalist of ABC News and National Public Radio. We will be presenting a tribute to the critically acclaimed, original Netflix series, “Orange is the New Black,” about women who are incarcerated in a federal prison. One of our APEX headliners will be Jenji Kohan, the show’s creator and executive producer. This TV show often deals with the mental health of the incarcerated women and has served to highlight the back stories of women who have been imprisoned. The show has enabled us to see each woman at earlier stages of her life, where interventions, including psychiatric treatment, might have made a difference. We will also be giving awards to policymakers and other leaders who have worked to reform the treatment of mentally ill individuals in the criminal justice system.

We planned the APEX awards event so that it would coincide with the Stepping Up National Summit, a training conference that is being held in Washington, D.C., from April 17 to 19. The summit is cosponsored by the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, the National Association of County Governments, and the Council of State Governments Justice Center. Included in the summit will be experts on mental health, criminal justice reform, and county officials who are all working toward the common goal of meaningful prison and mental health reform. Our objective for the APEX awards is not just to shine a light on these individuals and the tremendous work that they do, but also to provoke a broad national dialogue around the problem of the widespread incarceration of people with mental illness.

We are calling this an “orange tie” event because incarcerated individuals often wear orange, and thus we are asking attendees to wear something orange, such as a tie, a scarf, or an accessory. This event will be an extraordinary gathering of great minds and great people who are working toward the common goal of reducing the criminalization of people with mental illness.

As the state psychiatric hospitals in the United States have been closed and funding for community mental health services has diminished, individuals with mental illness, who might otherwise have wound up in those facilities, are now winding up in correctional facilities. This is especially true for populations that have been socioeconomically marginalized. In many states, the largest “psychiatric facilities” are prisons and jails. Once incarcerated, people with mental illness tend to stay longer than others with similar offenses and are often victimized. Upon release, these individuals are at a higher risk of returning to incarceration than those without these illnesses. Significant reforms are needed, especially in funding community mental health programs and offering alternatives to incarceration, such as jail diversion programs, collaborative courts, and assertive community treatment.

As APA president, I am thrilled that we are addressing a national problem that affects our patients with serious mental illness who wind up in the criminal justice system. We want our patients to get treatment rather than incarceration.

I hope you’ll join me and a veritable “who’s who” in psychiatry, along with celebrities, media, government officials, nonprofit partners, and others on April 18 at the Mayflower Hotel to honor this year’s winners. The awards ceremony and dinner is a must-attend event for anyone who cares about decreasing the criminalization of people with mental illness. The event is also a means to raise funds to support the work and mission of our APA Foundation. ■