Minority Students

Mental illness does not discriminate; it strikes both rich and poor and cuts across all ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Thus, the effective treatment of people suffering from mental illness requires a culturally competent psychiatric workforce. Equally important, however, is a workforce that understands and relates to patients of various backgrounds because they themselves are members of that particular group. Because of this need and the shortage of minority psychiatrists, the recruitment of minority students into psychiatry has become a high priority for the psychiatric profession and for APA.

The American Psychiatric Foundation and APA have teamed up with AstraZeneca to address this challenge by creating the American Psychiatric Foundation/AstraZeneca Fund for Minority Recruitment, with an educational grant of $25,000 from AstraZeneca. This fund will be administered by the foundation’s Board of Directors and will support special initiatives by APA to recruit minority students into psychiatry.

“Attracting minorities to psychiatry is a high priority for our profession,” said Abram M. Hostetter, M.D., president of the foundation. “The foundation is grateful to AstraZeneca for providing this grant as it will significantly enhance our profession’s ability to reach out to medical students and encourage them to choose psychiatry as a career.”

Initiatives that could be supported by this fund include special exhibits at meetings attended by minority medical students, workshops, and mentoring activities that foster relationships with leaders in psychiatry and demonstrate the benefits and opportunities of psychiatry as a career path.

As the administrator of this fund, the foundation will review requests from APA’s Division of Education, Minority, and National Affairs and will make awards for projects that are consistent with the goals of the fund.

The American Psychiatric Foundation is a charitable and educational subsidiary of APA. Its mission is to improve the lives of patients and their families and communities through support of public education, advocacy, and research initiatives that advance the understanding, prevention, and treatment of mental illness.

More information about the foundation is posted on the Web at www.psych.org/foundation/index.cfm. ▪