The board of directors of the National Mental Health Association (NMHA) appointed a leading APA member to its impressive roster of professionals and mental health advocates last June.
Nada Stotland, M.D., speaker of the APA Assembly, a member of the
Psychiatric News Editorial Advisory Board, and a professor of psychiatry and obstetrics/gynecology at Rush Medical College, Chicago, was one of six appointees to the NMHA board of directors.
Clifford Beers, a psychiatric patient, established the NMHA in 1909 to make reforms in psychiatric institutions and fight widespread discrimination against people with mental illness. Today the organization has 340 affiliates across the nation.
People serving on the NMHA’s board of directors represent different backgrounds and professional interests. They include attorneys, business executives, a variety of health care professionals, and a U.S. senator.
Stotland joins two other psychiatrists on the board. One is Mary Jane England, M.D., a former APA president and now president of Regis College in Massachusetts, and the other is J. Richard Elpers, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles. Elpers is also president and chair of the board of directors of the Mental Health Association of California.
“It is a great honor to serve on the board of NMHA,” Stotland told Psychiatric News. “Psychiatry will get nowhere, clinically, scientifically, or legislatively, without the support of the public, and we all have a great deal to learn from those who experience psychiatry as patients and family members.”
Stotland said she will be involved in an NMHA panel convening later this month to discuss remission and recovery in mental illness. “If our patients are to recover or develop full lives, we have to look beyond the relief of symptoms,” she said. She added that this dedication to patients’ recovery will require health care professionals to form new collaborations and rethink their roles.
Stotland sees her roles both at APA and the NMHA as “synergistic” and believes that they carry a basic responsibility. “The only way to demonstrate that [psychiatrists] are not mere pill pushers, that we do not blame families for the mental illnesses of their children, that we are not preoccupied with our own incomes and prerogatives but with the public good, and that we are willing to listen, learn, and teach, is to be there.” ▪
