Young Psychiatrists Want New Ways to Relate to APA
Publication: Psychiatric News
Tomorrow's psychiatrists want to be involved in APA—and they want APA to be interested in them.
Tech-savvy, oriented to grassroots organizing as opposed to top-down solutions, and eager to be advocates for the patients they will be treating, they are looking for an APA that may have to retool the way it reaches out to trainees and early career psychiatrists.
APA President-elect Carol Bernstein, M.D., talks to residents and fellows at a town-hall meeting during APA's 2009 Institute on Psychiatric Services in New York. Bernstein said trainees want to have more opportunities for social networking with their own peers, grassroots organizing, and local mentoring.
Credit: Ellen Dallager
Those were some of the messages that residents, fellows, and early career psychiatrists brought to a town-hall meeting at APA's 2009 Institute on Psychiatric Services in New York in October. The meeting, hosted by APA President-elect Carol Bernstein, M.D., attracted nearly 60 of APA's youngest members.
Bernstein opened the meeting with a brief introduction and then spent the next two hours simply listening. Some of those present had high praise for APA's advocacy efforts and for the resources made available by the Department of Government Relations to members who want to write or speak directly with congressional representatives and other elected leaders.
But many also expressed a desire to see a more grassroots-oriented APA, better use of social networking technology and improvements to the APA Web site, enhanced access to APA leadership, and mentoring in their own communities—especially during the critical period when trainees transition into practice—and greater communication between local training programs.
“Maybe the most optimistic thing that came out of the meeting is simply the realization that trainees really do want to be involved in APA,” Kayla Pope, M.D., the member-in-training trustee-elect, told Psychiatric News.
“But as a trainee, it's really hard to figure out APA and how to access it,” she said. “There's such a disconnection between the local district branches and the national organization. So making APA more relevant at the local level, decentralizing things, and providing mentoring at the local level—those were the themes that came out of the meeting.”
Several residents also spoke of wishing they could network more with residents in other training programs in their locale. “Most of the trainees at George Washington University, where I trained, didn't talk to residents at the [nearby] University of Maryland and at Georgetown,” Pope said. “So I think there are real opportunities there for building a professional community early on.”
At press time, Bernstein said she was planning on holding two more similar town-hall-style meetings with residents in Boston and Washington, D.C.
“All during my career, I have been focused on young people, on the next generation of psychiatrists,” said Bernstein, who is associate dean for graduate medical education at New York University School of Medicine and vice chair for education in psychiatry there. “This is a first step in finding out what the members of tomorrow care about. If we can't engage them, we won't have an APA in 20 years.”
Bernstein said she believes psychiatry, like many other professions, is experiencing generational change in the workplace. Today's young clinicians have little use for top-down organizational structures—after all, she notes, this is the generation that helped to transform the way the last national presidential campaign was won, with the Obama campaign's successful mobilization of electronic social networking tools and grassroots organizing.
She said a similar retooling of the way the Association engages early career psychiatrists is especially important. “It's during the transition from training to beginning practice that many of our members become disengaged from the association,” Bernstein said.
For Bernstein, graduated dues structures—typically offered as a solution for young psychiatrists struggling with debt and just beginning to build a practice—is not an answer, or at any rate not a final answer. “That only pushes back the period when people decide to drop out anyway, if they don't at some point get really involved,” Bernstein said. “So the real issue is how to engage these young people, how to get them involved.”
She said trainees want to have more opportunities for social networking with their own peers, grassroots organizing, and local mentoring.
More meetings with national leaders, like her, in different parts of the country aren't a solution either. Instead, Bernstein said she would like to see APA leaders in their local cities and communities taking on the responsibility to act as mentors to trainees and early career psychiatrists, offering grand round courses on APA membership and benefits and helping to engage young clinicians in advocacy.
Bernstein said she believes the technological tools for change, the aging of the APA membership, and the emergence of a new generation of clinicians who really understand the value of grassroots networking have come together to create an opportunity for change.
“We are aligned to really make APA more effective and relevant in the 21st century,” she said. 
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Published online: 4 December 2009
Published in print: December 4, 2009
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