APA continued to strengthen its advocacy and communications efforts last month with the hiring of Lydia Sermons-Ward to head the Office of Communication and Public Affairs. That office is part of the recently established Division of Advocacy, which also includes the Department of Government Relations and the Office of Healthcare Systems and Financing.
Eugene Cassel, J.D., director of the Division of Advocacy, commented that Sermons-Ward's “knowledge and experience are an asset to APA and will be crucial as we work to improve public understanding of mental illness and the importance of psychiatric care.”
Sermons-Ward, who joined APA on June 1, was senior vice president for communications and marketing at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling and prior to that was communications director for Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams.
Sermons-Ward acknowledged that educating people about what psychiatrists do, what their patients' illnesses are like, and the deleterious effect of the stigma that continues to surround mental illness will be formidable tasks.
Among the first undertakings on her agenda, she said, is helping APA leaders and senior staff come to an agreement about what the public perception of psychiatry is and how stereotypes or misconceptions should then be addressed. “We all need to speak the same core message” and do it consistently, she emphasized. This is especially important when it comes to the key goal of educating the public and legislators on the differences between treatment provided by nonphysicians and that provided by psychiatrists.
Sermons-Ward said she also will be targeting entertainment media, whose portrayals “feed the public's image of psychiatrists and their patients.” And she intends to arrange meetings between newspaper editors and reporters and leading psychiatric clinicians and researchers.
In addition to her experience in the Washington, D.C., mayor's office, Sermons-Ward served as communications director at the Department of the Treasury and has worked as a producer at television stations in Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn., where she developed and scheduled public service announcements, among other duties. “I know how to get things on the air,” which will be important as APA enhances its public outreach efforts, she said.
She also spent a year working for the White House as press secretary for“ One America in the 21st Century—The President's Initiative on Race,” a one-year effort by President Bill Clinton to conduct a dialogue that he hoped would reduce the racial divide that still is a fact of life in the United States. ▪
