Candidates for Area 3 Trustee: Brian Crowley, M.D.

Change is urgently needed in our APA Board of Trustees (BOT). Recent BOT decisions drastically slashed the components and have markedly reduced the number of members able to participate in the life of our Association.

We need inclusiveness again. Meeting short-term budget shortfalls by taking a meat axe to the components and the Assembly budget, as well as by cutting members' representation on the Board itself—all these misguided recent actions of the BOT will lead to a small, poor, weak organization with a few elites at the top.

We need to give APA back to the members. If you elect me to the Board of Trustees, I will dedicate myself to this task.

Our APA needs to move toward a rational relation with the pharmaceutical industry, rethinking the interests of our patients and our profession, and reestablishing an adequate flow of money from industry to psychiatry. APA needs to be neither “drug dependent” nor avoidant of a healthy, mutually rewarding, strong relationship with this crucial industry. Too much of APA's recent behavior seems founded on “avoiding sin” and maintaining an illusion of purity, or on trying to appease critics in Congress and elsewhere who have their own agendas.

There have been terrible abuses: research projects perverted from honest science to a mendacious marketing device when industry “support” becomes distortion of data; ghost-written papers in journals; colleagues paid by a company giving a tilted, distorted spiel for one drug at a dinner meeting, rather than (as happened in the past) offering a balanced, reasonably fair view of treatment options for a particular condition.

I think we are strong and smart enough to think our way through to a new policy that will maintain our integrity as practitioners of the science and art of psychiatry while working constructively with pharma and its resources.

An experience from my prior APA service convinces me that we can develop the know-how to deal with pharma with strength and fidelity to our principles. In the 1980s I served on the APA Committee on Advertising. We had standards for industry ads in all APA publications; the staff monitored the proposed ads. Then the committee demanded changes, or prevented publication, in cases where an industry submission did not meet our standards for accuracy, fidelity to evidence, and current science, as well as for taste. There were some cliff-hanging battles, but the result was good, honest, and fair ads in APA publications and a continuing, constructive relationship with pharma. This process, I'm told, still functions well along the same lines.

Let's recast our relation to industry while using needed funds appropriately to benefit psychiatry. We can do it!

Respecting the real honor that this nomination means, I ask you to elect me so that I can work hard for you to implement these needed reforms on the Board of Trustees.