APA Makes It Easy for Members To Communicate With State Lawmakers

APA and its Division of Government Relations have started an initiative to make it easier for members to stay up to date on key legislative issues in their state that are likely to have an impact on a wide range of mental health and psychiatric practice issues.

The new online service on APA’s Web site informs members about activities in state legislatures that are vital to psychiatrists and the patients they treat. It also makes it simple for members to contact their elected state officials.

In a statement announcing the new online feature, outgoing APA President Paul Appelbaum, M.D., and Medical Director James H. Scully Jr., M.D., stressed that “because ‘all politics is local,’ it is incredibly important to APA to keep our members informed and enabled to take action on a local level in support of our patients and profession.”

APA envisions this new site, which is part of its online Advocacy Action Center, as an “interactive grass-roots advocacy tool” that will make it easy for members to contact their governor and state legislators about issues making their way through the legislative or regulatory process.

The new feature will also enable APA to organize e-mail and letter-writing efforts more efficiently when it believes that psychiatrists’ responses can play a critical role in passing or defeating state legislation affecting the mental health field.

Once members log on to the site and enter their ZIP code, the system links them to their state representatives and governor. (Such a recognition system already exists in APA’s federal online advocacy system.) Members can then access photos of state and local officials, as well as their phone numbers, e-mail addresses, names of staff members, committee assignments, voting records, and other data. There is also contact information for national and local media.

Appelbaum and Scully emphasized that “APA member involvement is critical to achieving our advocacy goals for our patients and the profession.”

The bills and other advocacy issues that APA flags on the new site will be ones about which district branch officers or executive directors alert the Division of Government Relations, whose staff administers the site.

Since the feature’s debut, two district branches have taken advantage of it. In Indiana, the advocacy system posted an alert about a parity bill and provided a model letter—submitted by the Indiana district branch—that members could send to their elected representatives urging them to support this key piece of legislation. This Indiana parity bill has already progressed further in the legislature than previous incarnations of parity legislation, according to Heather Whyte, the state legislative field representative in the Division of Government Relations. In Maryland, the system was used to monitor and help psychiatrists register their opposition to a bill that seeks to allow correctional-system managers with no mental health training—in addition to psychiatrists and mental health professionals—to initiate involuntary psychiatric commitment procedures for inmates.

The new feature can be accessed through APA’s Web site at www.psych.org by clicking on “Advocacy Action Center” on the homepage. State legislative updates and form letters can be accessed by entering a ZIP code next to the “State Officials” box. ▪