Association of Women Psychiatrists
APA Election
| Office | Candidate |
| Trustee at Large |
Herbert Peyser, M.D. |
AWP: What have you done to advance women’s involvement in organized psychiatry and specifically in the APA? Please tell us your specific accomplishments.
Peyser: Cultural and minority diversity in APA membership and leadership is essential for reaching out to minority and underserved patient populations It is essential for understanding and relating to them, for the development of identification and trust. The largest such patient group is women. To meet this we must significantly increase recruitment of women psychiatrists and we must increase the number of women in leadership positions. Women are now moving toward 50% of APA.
Five years ago another Trustee and I began an initiative to assign one Trustee-at-Large spot to the minorities and underrepresented groups (M/URs). It has taken time but we finally have a de facto M/UR Trustee-at-Large, an African-American woman who had run against an Indo-American man, thus ensuring a M/UR Board presence. I pledge myself to continuing the precedent with an emphasis on women, the largest M/UR group.
In my DB and Area I have been instrumental in the moving up of women into the leadership, with the nomination and election of women state officers, one poised to be NY State Vice-President and succeed to the Presidency. I have similarly been instrumental in nominating a woman successor to me as Area Trustee, increasing women on the APA Board.
AWP: What important issues for women would you promote? How would you do this?
Peyser: Research studies have tended to involve male populations, leaving women and their special needs less well known and less well defined. In my own subspecialty, addiction, we have learned how women differ from men in their physiological response to alcohol and how special attention must be given to that. They also differ in the circumstances leading to the different addictions, and this is true where other psychiatric disorders are concerned. Other research has revealed how women are regarded differently by physicians and, unfortunately, less seriously at times than men where psychiatric illness is concerned. They are even given different diagnoses. This picture must be changed by APA devoting itself to promoting special research projects and educating researchers and academics in these matters. Women attending to these matters must be specifically included in IRBs.
The Committee on Misuse and Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists should be given a mandate to investigate such matters as the discrimination against women both as patients and as professionals and report back to the Assembly and Board on the matter, with recommendations.
AWP: What strategies would you use to promote the retention and recruitment of women in APA?
Peyser: The above matters, if carried out, will promote retention and recruitment, but other initiatives must be added. An active campaign mobilized by the women’s APA groups can develop a program for education of the DBs and state societies in these matters and the setting up of women’s committees there with support from central APA. APA women’s groups may need to work out other specific issues, such as how to have a residency and still be able to have and care for children, for the ages of child bearing and of training coincide and women should not have to make a choice between their womanhood and their professional interests. Child care help at APA meetings and in hospitals and academia would be in order. Forms of half time residency and fellowship sharing, child care there too, etc. can be investigated and improved.
Early career women particularly need attention for this is the time when young physicians do the work that can move them up. If other commitments mean they cannot devote time to research they cannot move up in academia. Similar commitments can interfere with activities needed for the development of a practice, moving up in hospitals, APA and other professional endeavors.
Frances Bell
info@womenpsych.org
http://www.womenpsych.org/new.html
Last updated March 29, 2006 08:07 PM
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