APA past President Altha Stewart, M.D., is well known within psychiatry for her steadfast leadership of APA and devotion to uplifting individuals with serious mental illness, especially people of color. This year, she is the recipient of APA’s Solomon Carter Fuller Award.
The award, named for the first known Black psychiatrist, honors a Black citizen who has pioneered in an area that has significantly improved the quality of life for Black people. Stewart said she has attended many Solomon Carter Fuller Award lectures at APA Annual Meetings. The experiences she has had at those lectures and the lifelong connections she’s made with the speakers have been some of her happiest Annual Meeting memories, she told Psychiatric News. Past winners include Donna Norris, M.D., Alvin Poussaint, M.D., James Comer, M.D., Jeanne Spurlock, M.D., Chester Pierce, M.D., Carl Bell, M.D., and Patricia Newton, M.D.
“I consider myself honored, but extremely humbled, to now be included among that lineage of award recipients,” she said.
Stewart has devoted her career to service in the public sector, training as a community psychiatrist and working with patients from low-income communities to ensure they receive psychiatric treatment. She has worked in Philadelphia, Detroit, New York City, and Memphis, and each city presented a unique set of challenges to ensuring access to mental health care, she said. “But the common denominator of all these places was that they had large African American, Latino, and immigrant populations who needed their psychological needs addressed through the lens of culture,” she said.
Stewart will present this year’s Solomon Carter Fuller Award lecture at APA’s Annual Meeting. One topic she plans to touch on is the importance of White allies in effecting change and encouraging diversity, inclusion, and equity within psychiatry and the APA leadership.
“The field of psychiatry and APA have historically been dominated by White men, and we need White allies to stand up and say, ‘I’m a member of this privileged group, and I am here to say that we must change,’ ” Stewart said. “We have a lot of work to do with respect to anti-racism in the delivery of quality psychiatric services. We must have these difficult discussions about these issues, and Black people cannot always be the ones leading these discussions.
“We are at a critical point,” she continued. “Psychiatry has to be the leader of the kind of change we want to see in the world.” ■
Stewart will present the Solomon Carter Fuller Award Lecture, titled “The Caravan Moves On: From Solomon Carter Fuller to Psychiatry in the 21st Century,” on Saturday, May 1, from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
