Robinowitz Runs for Influential AMA Post

Carolyn B. Robinowitz, M.D., one of 14 psychiatrists who represent APA in the AMA’s House of Delegates, will vie for a seat on the AMA’s influential Council on Scientific Affairs at the AMA’s annual meeting in Chicago next month.

Robinowitz, a former APA senior deputy medical director, is one of four announced candidates for the council seats open in the House of Delegates’ annual election.

The Council on Scientific Affairs (CSA) is one of seven councils advising the AMA’s Board of Trustees on policy. As the council entrusted with advising the trustees on all clinical and research topics, the members of the CSA can have considerable influence in shaping the AMA’s public policy efforts.

In the past year the CSA has played a part in advising the House of Delegates on a wide variety of proposed changes in AMA policy, including opposition to reparative therapy, opposition to the patenting of human genes, the safety and efficacy of psychotropic medications in children, and the unique difficulties of geriatric pharmacology.

“At times,” APA President Daniel B. Borenstein, M.D., told Psychiatric News, “the council has produced one of its otherwise excellent reports that overlooks much of the current knowledge from our field. Having Carolyn on the council would correct this problem not only through her own knowledge, but also in making sure the council receives timely input from APA.”

“I hope that I would bring added value to the panel,” Robinowitz told Psychiatric News. “I know that advances in science must be translated effectively into practical applications and clinical programs, and I have spent the last two decades doing just that.”

The openings on the CSA create an opportunity that APA is well poised to take advantage of, according to Joseph T. English, M.D., chief of psychiatry at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, a former APA president, and the current chair of the AMA’s Section Council on Psychiatry. The section council is composed of seven voting delegates, of which Robinowitz is one, and seven alternate delegates, who represent psychiatry in the House of Delegates. Delegates are appointed by the APA president and the president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“Psychiatry now comprises the fourth largest specialty in the House of Delegates,” English told Psychiatric News. “The time is right for us to put our growing voice to good use to ensure that appropriate and timely input from psychiatry is heard in the deliberations of the house.”

“As medicine’s gains in knowledge of the human mind really begin to impact us in the coming decades of the new century,” said Saul Levin, M.D., a Washington, D.C., psychiatrist and alternate delegate, “psychiatry is going to play a pivotal role, both in terms of mental illness and its biological components and in substance abuse as well.”

Levin, who is advising Robinowitz on her campaign, told Psychiatric News that the council is where the AMA will begin to address these as well as other major issues.

Robinowitz, who recently returned to private practice in Washington, D.C., after serving as academic dean at Georgetown University School of Medicine, was trained in pediatrics and general psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and in child psychiatry at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

She was the founding director of the Office of Education at APA and later served as chief operating officer, responsible for APA’s scientific and public policy coordination and implementation. In addition to her long association with APA and the AMA, she was the first woman to be elected president of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies and the first woman president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. She has also served as president of the Association for Academic Psychiatry, the American College of Psychiatrists, and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.

Robinowitz said she would work to address the areas of clinical research, recruiting, and the training and retraining of “trench researchers” and their translation of science data into clinical applications.

The AMA’s elections will be held Tuesday, June 19, at the House of Delegates’ annual meeting in Chicago. The proceedings will be posted at www.ama-assn.org. ▪