2021 Annual Meeting: CEO and Medical Director Address

Welcome friends and colleagues.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge the Piscataway and Nacotchtank people whose land I am speaking from today. I recognize we are guests of these ancestral lands of Indigenous people who came before us and would like to honor them and their ancestors.

Now, it is my distinct honor to call this virtual Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association to order.

This is a special meeting during difficult and trying times. I wish very much that we were all meeting in person; however, I believe this virtual space has the opportunity to connect us as an organization in a different way.

Last year, we saw tremendous challenges, in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic and the palpable impact of structural racism on our society. This has been a test for us to examine ourselves, our organization, and our community, and to determine how to improve. These challenges have demonstrated that our work as experts in the mind, body, and brain is more vital now than ever before.

Psychiatrists across the country and across the globe have risen to meet the challenges of the COVID era and have continued to deliver high-quality care to patients through the innovative use of technology, as well as old-fashioned dedication and passion to our patients and profession. Members stepped up and endeavored to meet the growing demand for psychiatric services, and our COVID Task Force compiled and created scores of resources that our members and psychiatrists have made use of as we adapted.

COVID-19 ripped the band aid off historical inequities, exposing the impacts of structural racism on the mental and physical health of racial and ethnic minorities. This was compounded by events including police killings and mass shootings in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado. We have spoken up as psychiatry, to point attention to the existence and pervasiveness of structural racism, to say Black Lives Matter and Stop AAPI Hate.

Much remains to be done. But as we undertook a historic and overdue reckoning with structural racism this year within our organization, I am heartened for the future. The efforts of so many of our leadership, our members, and our administration showed that we can look toward an antiracist, inclusive, and equitable future for our profession and our patients. We listened to members, and the Board and I both worked with experts in that area. It took and will take hard work, and changes to our outlooks, and to our policies and procedures.

I also want to commend our staff for their dedication and resilience. Many of our members did not even realize that all but a small handful of us were working at home since last March, because our staff seamlessly delivered the services that make APA membership so valuable. A few staff in office management, IT, and finance came in to ensure essential services were available, and I’m very personally grateful to them.

While the pandemic is not over, we hope that 2021 will end with a beginning of the “new normal” working environment. As we make this transition away from the COVID era, our health and well-being, particularly mental health, is a chief concern. In good news, many more hospitals and systems are joining our PsychPro registry, because before we weren’t able to collect data on neuropsychiatric symptoms of COVID. Mental health needs will be well served by this registry, just like internal medicine, pediatrics, and other specialties.

I want to express deep thanks to APA President Dr. Jeffrey Geller. A long-standing historian of psychiatry, he drew on his understanding of the past to serve us with gravitas and empathy. He stepped up under exceptionally hard times, in which the APA needed to deal with multiple significant challenges. He led us with professionalism, kind words, and always with a quiet assuredness. He helped me and the Administration keep the Ship of APA continuing to do its day-to-day work, while dealing with COVID-19. He helped us start deep introspection on how to become an association where antiracism and equality for all is embedded in the fabric of who we are, who we need to be, and who we are becoming with the change of demographics of who’s coming into psychiatry. My Administration and I also owe thanks to the Board of Trustees, Assembly, Components, other leaders, and volunteer members, who serve as the backbone of our Association.

Chair of the Scientific Program Committee Dr. Jacqueline Feldman, the Committee, and APA staff in the Division of Education have all of our thanks for assembling a robust virtual program for this meeting. Our Meetings Management and Integrated Marketing teams reinvented what the Annual Meeting looked like and delivered it to you through the taping of hundreds of sessions and other behind-the-scenes efforts that should not go unmentioned. My thanks also to the hundreds of members who taped those sessions! This year of Zoom, Teams meetings, and other e-platforms of communications have changed not just us, but all medical societies, and meetings in the future will be in-person plus online.

One bright spot this year was that on Match Day 2021, 1,907 PGY-1 slots were made available for psychiatry, the most in the modern era. I am thrilled to say that nearly 100% of those slots were filled. It is heartening to see the younger generations elect to join our noble profession. However, we need to continue the fight for more slots for psychiatrists. Anxiety and depression rates have increased significantly due to the pandemic, and many more individuals are seeking mental health and substance use care. It is time for us to stand firm, and I call on you to help the APA remind our colleagues in the nation that there is no health without mental health.

To our friends in nursing, social work, physicians assistants, primary care, and psychology who sacrificed to ensure that patients continued to get mental health care during the pandemic: thank you.

I will take a moment of appreciation for the frontline psychiatrists, from medical students to residents to faculty, and to those who changed their practices to telepsychiatry to ensure their patients could continue with their treatment. In this time, more than ever, you showed that we are physicians first alongside our house of medicine colleagues.

We deeply mourn those members, and some of their families, that we lost to COVID-19.

As we carry burdens of the past year and continue to seek to help others, it will be important to get help where we need it, but also to mind our words—spoken and written—and communicate with empathy, thoughtfulness, and professionalism, even when we disagree.

We are all in this together, and together we will emerge stronger for the trials we have endured. Let us look to the future and the continuation of the work of our oldest national medical society in the USA, the American Psychiatric Association.

Thank you.