Harding Hails Members’ Efforts to ‘Make a Difference’
The Opening Session of APA’s annual meeting is replete with pomp and circumstance. The stage is outfitted with colorful flags, two imposing podiums, and chairs for the APA leadership and other dignitaries. Hanging in front of the curtain at the back of the stage is an immense replica of APA’s seal, which contains the likeness of Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry. Colossal videoscreens broadcast the action from either side of the stage. As the lights dim and their names are announced, APA leaders march across the stage to music, and the speeches begin.
Incoming APA President Richard Harding, M.D.: “We must be free to build new systems of care that maximize patient choice and enhance the doctor-patient relationship.”
“I have had the honor of sitting on this stage seven times. Each time, I have been inspired. . . ,” he said. “But, with all due respect to those on this stage, it is you, the members of APA, in the audience of this great hall, who truly inspire me. By your example of patient care and psychiatric administrative duties, you continue to make a difference in the day-to-day lives of your individual patients and a difference in the private, academic, and state and federal treatment programs in which you serve. We, on this stage, are in awe of you!”
Harding and his family have tried to live up to the ideal of serving others. Since 1900, he said, four generations of the family have been psychiatrists and APA members. His great-grandparents, Drs. George and Phoebe Harding, became physicians in the 1870s, and their progeny has produced 27 physicians, including 13 psychiatrists. A notable exception to the family business was Warren G. Harding, who, APA’s new president deadpanned, chose to “become a newspaper editor and increasingly became involved in state and national politics.” The next generation included three psychiatrists, who with Harding’s two oldest brothers (George and Herndon) built a nationally known psychiatric hospital in Columbus, Ohio. The fourth generation has yielded two psychiatrists.
Harding noted that the 2001 annual meeting was the first in the new millennium. The last decade of the last millennium saw myriad insults to patient care and the practice of psychiatry, he said.
“So what have we learned? What has been and should be our response? We have learned what passivity does to our patients, our profession, and our self-esteem. Many psychiatrists still plead, ‘Just leave me alone and let me treat my patients.’ You know, that just doesn’t work anymore.”
Psychiatrists, he continued, have much work to do in so many areas: patient care, professional standards, residency training, patient confidentiality, communication with patients and society, and research.
“It is a new time for all of us. . . .We must be free to build new systems of care that maximize patient choice and enhance the doctor-patient relationship,” Harding declared to the audience’s enthusiastic applause.
He noted, as had outgoing APA President Daniel Borenstein, M.D., in his speech (see Original article: page 1), that APA’s recent transition to a 501(c)(6) nonprofit business organization will allow the Association to increase its political advocacy activities for patients and the profession.
This is not to say that psychiatry and its professional organization have not been effective up to now, however. In fact, said Harding, it’s time “to blow our own horn. In the last decade, we doubled the research dollars at NIH. In the last decade, psychiatric research funding in medical schools has risen from eighth place to second, trailing only internal medicine. We are invigorating the training of psychotherapies in our residency programs. We are recruiting a disproportionate share of minority and underrepresented medical school graduates into our training programs and are recruiting the highest-quality international medical school graduates. We are working to assure that our members will be the most clinically competent physicians among all specialties.”
Now it’s time to build on those gains. Harding challenged his listeners—the heroes he acknowledged earlier—to leave behind any talk of early retirement and become involved in advocacy activities.
“We have a duty to serve our individual patients and improve the public’s health. We have a duty to support the politicians who risk their careers to support our patients’ needs,” he declared. “We have a duty to forge new alliances with our patients and their families. We have a duty to resist systems of care that undermine the doctor-patient relationship and give incentives for withholding care. We have a duty to continue to support the common good of excellent care for all our patients and for the residents of this country who happen to have a mental illness. We have a duty to join hands with our global brothers and sisters to help standardize our nomenclature and deliver the highest quality of psychiatric care throughout the world.
“If not APA, who? We have a duty. This great Association always does its duty!” ▪
