My Hopes for the Future

This is my inaugural “From the President” article. My primary goal and purpose in this column is to communicate my thoughts about where I hope APA and our members can increase their accomplishments and achieve new goals. I hope the column will not only inform members about opportunities that APA has to offer, but also inspire your new or continued participation in those of interest to you.

As you may be aware, APA is the largest psychiatric society in the world. We are approaching 39,000 members, and while our journals and DSM are important to our colleagues everywhere, our organization is doing so much more!

Despite our living in the information age, it is genuinely hard to stay informed. There are so many sources of information competing for our attention—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other online sites that many of us visit more frequently than is probably healthy—so I aim to make my column a good use of your time.

Travel and representation of APA have become essential tasks for the president and president-elect, and I hope to share with you my experiences. I’ve already had the pleasure of visiting many places around our country and had many wonderful and interesting conversations with our members. It is the opportunity to talk to colleagues who universally share a dedication to providing the highest quality of care and an interest in professional growth and development of their skills that is the real reward of my travels.

While I know more than a few APA members, I thought I would begin by telling you about myself as a way of introduction. I have spent almost my entire professional career in the Bronx, N.Y. I trained in the Einstein psychiatry residency at Jacobi Hospital (an NYC municipal hospital) and went on to head up psychiatric hospital services before moving on to Montefiore Medical Center as clinical director and eventually deputy chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The Bronx has the most open green space of any borough in New York City and is the birthplace of hip-hop as well as Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B, to name just a few celebrities who hail from here. While no trip to New York City should be considered complete without a visit to the Bronx Zoo (the largest zoo in the United States), the Botanical Gardens, or Yankee Stadium, unfortunately these are not the images that come to most people’s minds when they think about the Bronx. With a population of almost 1.5 million, the Bronx is one of the poorest counties in this country with among the largest health disparities. Lack of access to primary care services, healthy food, and healthy air and high rates of obesity, diabetes, and smoking are just a few of the health problems here. We also have the highest rates of children living in poverty.

Montefiore has become the “poster child” for population health in an effort to address the pervasive health and mental health morbidities of our community. This has been integral to my professional mission—to try to provide high-quality psychiatric care to a very impoverished and disadvantaged community. I can only compliment Montefiore for its commitment to providing care to this community despite constrained resources, and I am honored to have played a strategic role. So please be aware that many of my issues and concerns are born of this experience.

Just so you don’t leave thinking how challenging my life has been, I met my wife at Einstein, our son graduated from the Einstein medical school, and my daughter worked as a nurse at Montefiore. I could not imagine a better life than I’ve had in the Bronx.

One last goal—I hope to keep my columns to one page. I hate flipping through newspapers to finish an article! ■