APA Members Pick Appelbaum To Be Next President-Elect

Final vote tallies in the 2001 APA election show that APA Vice President Paul Appelbaum, M.D., won the race to become president-elect by a resounding margin.

Appelbaum, one of the country’s leading forensic psychiatrists, is chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and director of its law and psychiatry program. He won 72.4 percent of the vote to 27.6 percent for his opponent, Jon Gudeman, M.D., of Wisconsin.

Appelbaum is completing a two-year term as an APA vice president and prior to that served as its secretary. He also spent six years as chair of the Commission on Judicial Action. Appelbaum is a past president of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. An expert in confidentiality and privacy issues, he has on several occasions testified before Congress on these concerns, as well as on the need for increased funding for psychiatric research.

Appelbaum told Psychiatric News that he is “honored by the support of so many APA members,” and emphasized that “now the real work begins. We have a full agenda of issues that affect [psychiatrists] and patients and no time to lose in addressing them. I hope that all of our members, no matter whom they voted for, are willing to roll up their sleeves and help us fight for what we know is right.”

Among the items on the agenda during his term as president-elect and president, he said, is a public education and legislative advocacy effort that focuses on reversing the steadily eroding funding for mental health services in both the private and public sectors.

He also plans to use whatever resources APA can muster to fight psychologists’ attempts to gain prescribing privileges. If successful, these efforts “threaten to have the most destructive impact on the quality of mental health care of any factor in a generation,” he said. “It is absurd to think of turning loose on persons with mental illness psychologists with a few distance-learning courses under their belts.”

A third priority of his presidency will be on improving the success APA has in recruiting and retaining members, Appelbaum noted. “I think we do a terrible job of letting members know the many ways APA is working to help them. I think I know how to change that, and doing so is a top priority for me. I believe that if psychiatrists fully understood everything APA does for our field, it would be unthinkable for them not to be members.”

The contest to fill the vacant vice-presidential position on the Board was won by Michelle Riba, M.D., the current APA secretary. Riba outpolled former Assembly speaker Donna Norris, M.D., by 60.5 percent to 39.5 percent. (APA has two vice presidents; thus each year one of the two positions is contested. Marcia Goin, M.D., is about to begin her second year as APA’s other vice president.)

Riba is associate chair for education and academic affairs and a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan’s psychiatry department.

Pedro Ruiz, M.D., of Houston bested Thomas Allen, M.D., of Maryland in the race to succeed Riba as APA secretary. Ruiz garnered 59.4 percent of the vote to 40.6 percent for Allen.

The trustee-at-large contest went to Patrice Harris, M.D., of Atlanta. Harris, chair of the APA Committee of Black Psychiatrists, won 57.5 percent of the ballots cast to 42.5 percent for her opponent, Manoj Shah, M.D., of New York.

Susan Padrino, M.D., came out the victor in the four-way contest to become the member-in-training trustee-elect. She led as each round of preferential balloting eliminated one of her opponents. She is a resident in psychiatry and internal medicine at Duke. Her opponents were Mark Amerding, M.D., Denise Greene, M.D., and Bryon Evans, M.D.

There were two Area trustee positions up for election this year. In Area 3 Roger Peele, M.D., beat John Urbaitis, M.D., by 63.6 percent to 36.4 percent. In Area 6 incumbent Maurice Rappaport, M.D., attracted 56.1 percent of the vote to 43.9 percent for his opponent Maria Lymberis, M.D.

All of the winning candidates begin their terms at the close of the 2001 annual meeting, which will be held next month in New Orleans.

This year 36.3 percent of eligible voting members cast ballots in the election. While up slightly from last year’s all-time low of 34.9 percent, the percentage of members returning ballots continues to lag well behind this past decade’s high of 43.6 percent in 1995. The all-time highest rate of return since 1968, the earliest year for which there are data, was 61.3 percent in 1972 and 1978. The 1980s saw return rates ranging from 40.1 percent to 50.9 percent. ▪