The Importance of Remembering Our Shared History

This May in San Francisco, thousands of APA members will gather at our 2019 Annual Meeting, the premier psychiatric event of the year. This year’s gathering is particularly special because it celebrates our association’s 175th anniversary. It will be hard to come away from this gathering—where so much groundbreaking research and clinical updates are shared—without feeling as though psychiatry and APA have a very bright future. To best understand where psychiatry might go in the future, it’s important to understand the link between our shared past and the present day.

It is incredible to think of how this organization began, in 1844, with just 13 medical leaders from the nation’s psychiatric hospitals gathered in a room in Philadelphia. They were united by a desire to improve the lives of people with mental illness who, at the time, were largely cared for in substandard conditions if they received care at all. It’s important that we honor and remember the founders’ drive and compassion, which helped their patients live better lives.

We can’t know today if they knew then that their actions would have such a profound impact on our field. Their legacy of cooperation and innovation helped psychiatry emerge from murky beginnings and grow into the respected and valued medical specialty it is today. We must see that same spirit carry through into a future in which the health care landscape evolves rapidly, presenting new opportunities and new challenges.

We have come so far since the days when mental disorders were often blamed on the supernatural and when so very little was understood about the connection between the mind, brain, and body. Our understanding is much greater today, and though there are always challenges, psychiatrists are able to deliver effective, high-quality evidence-based care to our patients more successfully than ever before. Many of the problems of those early days still persist, however, leaving much that still needs to be accomplished as psychiatry presses on into the future.

We must use the lessons of the past as a platform for the foundational change needed to address the big problems that affect our patients and practice, including treatment gaps among minority/underrepresented groups, high incarceration rates for people with mental illness, access to care, the opioid crisis, and stigma.

As we look back at 175 years of American psychiatry that APA has helped to shape, it is important to recognize that on its own, information is not knowledge. We need a thorough and critical understanding of the events and ideas that make up our shared past if we are to challenge and update them for the future. As a signal of the importance of recognizing and understanding our past, a special track of sessions related to the 175th anniversary is part of this year’s scientific program.

I hope you’ll join me in San Francisco as we honor and celebrate those who came before us and build on their achievements to create a strong future to benefit our patients and our profession. ■