Stewart Brings a Robust and Eventful Presidential Year to a Close
Abstract
APA President Altha Stewart, M.D., told Annual Meeting attendees that because of efforts over the past year, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion “have been firmly embedded in the core work of APA.”
Recounting a remarkably eventful presidential year, APA President Altha Stewart, M.D., said the Association renewed its global reach while laying the groundwork for a more diverse and inclusive profession and responding to several national emergencies.
“We as psychiatrists knew very well the short-term and long-term trauma that [separation of migrant children from their parents] would inflict on the children and families,” says APA President Altha Stewart, M.D., at the Opening Session of APA’s 2019 Annual Meeting last month in San Francico. About 15,000 people attended the meeting.
In her address at the Opening Session on May 18, she marked the historic nature of the meeting—the 175th anniversary of APA—saying that the Association had traveled far since 1844 and was still pursuing the founders’ original vision.
“The resources have changed,” she said. “Today we’ve got modern technology. Even the most seriously mentally ill person generally navigates a phone well enough to get reminders about medication or appointments. But when you think about it, we’re using the resources we have today to provide humane treatment the way we did 175 years ago. It’s different, but it’s good to know we’re back to our original mission—to get the appropriate and best possible care to people at the time that they need it.”
Some of APA’s most important work this year was compelled by events in the news. “Early in the year we and many other Americans were stunned at the news of what was happening at our Southern border where [migrant] children and families were being separated,” Stewart said. “It was an APA member, Dr. Pamela McPherson, who first made us all aware that this policy was in place and spoke out against it.
“Because we as psychiatrists knew very well the short-term and long-term trauma that policy would inflict on the children and families involved, we decided it was time to step up. APA became one of the first medical organizations to condemn the policy, and then we took it further. We made it part of our work and became actively engaged in helping our colleagues who were working on the border. We devised some steps designed to ensure that those children and families impacted would receive evidence-based care. And we kept going on the advocacy work through the year, even as the country’s attention waned.”
She also highlighted APA’s new collaboration with AFFIRM, the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine. “APA joined this effort alongside many of our medical colleagues in the hopes that we’ll be able to add to the dialogue that’s happening around the world about gun violence from a research perspective,” she said.
“And in one of my last official acts as your president, I was honored to be part of APA’s delegation to the United Nations for the multistakeholder meeting on universal health coverage, where the health and mental health needs of vulnerable populations around the world and solutions for addressing them were discussed.”
The first African American president of APA, Stewart was most emphatic about the importance of efforts made in the past year to lay the groundwork for a more diverse profession in the future. “I count it among our biggest accomplishments of the past year that there was a real explosion of people who were out there either presenting, writing, or in some other way making sure that these issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion were being addressed,” she said.
(Stewart was introduced before her address by Norman Harris, a recent graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a participant in APA’s Black Men in Psychiatry Early Pipeline Program. Stewart is Harris’s mentor in the program.)
“What I sincerely hope is that urgency, thought, and action around diversity, equity, and inclusion have been firmly embedded in the core work of APA,” she said. “There is diverse subject-matter expertise available in all areas of psychiatry today—academia, clinical care, research, organized health systems, governmental mental health systems. We have to be intentional in looking for it, and [we have to] include those individuals in our work to improve psychiatric services going forward.”
The outgoing president hailed past APA Medical Director Melvin Sabshin, M.D., for providing what she called a “blueprint” for how to go forward in an historic special edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry that he edited, called “Dimensions of Institutional Racism in Psychiatry.” It appeared in December 1970, before Sabshin became medical director and immediately after a group of black psychiatrists, led by Chester Pierce, M.D., walked into a Board of Trustees meeting in 1969 demanding change.
That historic edition is “filled with references to what APA and American psychiatry needed to do to understand the needs of the diverse membership and minority populations we served at the time,” Stewart said.
A final priority of the outgoing president was engagement of trainees and early career psychiatrists in APA. Stewart said she endeavored to be intentional in inviting young psychiatrists to become involved in APA. “I have been encouraged by the level of positive response to that invitation. Our young people are working all over the organization, and I am over the moon. Watching them become involved in APA has truly been one of the highlights of my year.” ■
