How I Chose the Theme for This Year’s Annual Meeting

We struggle in these unsettled times. As we live through and address the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism and all forms of prejudice based on race and ethnicity, the needs of the LGBTQ communities for services that are respectful and inclusive, and the requirement to deal with climate change, we realize that the lack of equal opportunity for good, often even adequate, health care affects us all.

Inequities affect us not only in our position as psychiatrists, but as family members, friends, and neighbors and in the roles we play in society. The pandemic has forced us to face old challenges that now come to us at a magnitude heretofore unknown (at least in our lifetime): medical morbidities and mortality; economic, food, and housing insecurities; domestic violence; child abuse and neglect; and social isolation. Our patients—those we have known and those coming to us for the first time—are experiencing a pandemic of trauma that results in psychiatric symptoms, including anxiety, depression, and despair. We are seeing unprecedented rates of substance use, including deaths from opioid overdoses, and suicide. Our ability to interact with patients and colleagues has been compromised, creating a pervasive feeling of discomfort in many of us. Not only have we lost in-person contact with many patients, but social distancing has impacted teaching and training. Even research has been affected.

In 2021, we need an Annual Meeting that increases our skills to practice while expanding our understanding of and sensitivity to the social and cultural contexts in which we now work. We need a meeting that fortifies and empowers us. The meeting is a way to enhance our resilience, view these unsettling times as unparalleled opportunities to eliminate disparities in health care delivery, and pursue a meaningful and equitable future for our patients and the field of psychiatry. We can use this Annual Meeting to advance both knowledge and equity. And so I have carefully considered the appropriate theme for this meeting and chose “Finding Equity Through Advances in Mind & Brain in Unsettled Times.”

In this context, the online 2021 Annual Meeting will deliver all you have come to expect from APA’s in-person meetings. The experience will surely be different, but the scientific sessions will include the full range of topics you have come to appreciate and more. This is clearly evident as you peruse the Annual Meeting program in this issue of Psychiatric News.

Working with APA members and staff on the 2021 Annual Meeting has shown me that pulling together a scientific program is a labor of love. The process begins in May, a year before the actual Annual Meeting. Committees and subcommittees are formed (with attention given to representation by the broad diversity of APA members); listservs created; and, because of COVID-19, Zoom meetings scheduled.

The Scientific Program Committee (SPC) faces monumental tasks: It must follow rules set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, select sessions after reviewing and ranking over a thousand session abstracts (and providing pre-submission guidance to medical students, residents, and early career psychiatrists upon request), and oversee scheduling to avoid conflicts and create tracks—all under tight deadlines. By the way, each submission is reviewed by at least three members of the SPC. Of note, I was very pleased to see the high number of outstanding sessions related to diversity and health equity—more than 80% of them were accepted for the program.

The usual logistics of convention center planning, hotel accommodations, and program printing have been replaced with the challenges of delivering all the meeting content online, and the process has been no less complicated. Converting to an online meeting adds layers of challenges: Which vendor should we choose to provide a seamless meeting for all attendees? How do we get the sessions recorded, organized, and scheduled? How do we build in “live” interactions with attendees? How do we have posters and a virtual exhibit hall? How can we network? Many of these aspects are being handled by the very skilled APA staff.

The result of these activities will be a three-day meeting in May. Each day will start with a plenary with remarkable speakers. Each day’s program will offer three session blocks of 15 sessions each. These sessions will be prerecorded, but the faculty will be available during the sessions for live chat and a 15-minute question-and-answer period. Participants can receive up to 13.5 CME credits for the live meeting. The meeting will also include opportunities for networking, engaging with other members, and visiting the Virtual Exhibit Gallery.

In addition, there will be 400 pre-recorded sessions for the APA On Demand program available after the meeting. You can watch these sessions whenever and wherever you like on your electronic devices and earn CME credit as well.

This year’s scientific program will have an “equity lens” throughout the program while still attending to the science of our field. Mental health disparities will be discussed from a multitude of viewpoints. Sessions will examine the mind and brain, clinical presentations and diagnoses, biopsychosocial treatments, and population health. The impact of changes in statutes and regulations as well as major court decisions will be discussed. Practical solutions—from individual levels to systems of care—will be a focus. Our partners from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will be part of the program, along with invited experts.

So join us online this May for rich discussions and cutting-edge educational sessions that will help you sharpen your clinical skills and cast light on how we can meet the challenges of the moment together. We can emerge renewed, refreshed, and more knowledgeable—better able to deliver and to advocate for appropriate treatments for our patients and better able to assert the position of psychiatry in medicine. And perhaps, by sharing these three days in May, we can reset our own equilibrium. We can reach out to our fellow psychiatrists to chat, engage, exchange ideas, share contact information, and re-establish cherished connections. Then we can dream about meeting together in person in New Orleans in 2022. Join us by remote learning in 2021 and plan now to attend the live meeting in 2022. ■