September 12, 2019
The mission of the American Psychiatric Association (
https://www.psychiatry.org/) is to promote the highest quality care for individuals with mental illness, including substance use disorders, and their families, promote psychiatric education and research, advance and represent the profession of psychiatry, and serve the professional needs of its membership.
The primary goals are to: promote the rights and best interests of patients and those actually or potentially making use of psychiatric services for mental illness, including substance use disorders, improve access to and quality of psychiatric services, improve research into all aspects of mental illness, including causes, prevention, and treatment of psychiatric disorders, improve psychiatric education and training, promote optimal conditions for practice and career satisfaction, foster collaboration among all who are concerned with medical, psychological, and socio-cultural aspects of mental health and illness, and improve functioning of the APA in the service of its mission.
More and more, mental health professional are categorized as “therapists” as we have seen in recent articles and reports, which has significant implications for the professional identity of specific workforce groups like psychiatrists and clinical mental health counselors. We will explore this area, as well as how we can work together on strategic policy and program initiatives in light of the Presidential election cycle. We can also explore opportunities to work together on overarching areas on improving access and delivery or care.
Next StepsWe shared in a significant way with Dr. Schwartz’s remarks at the beginning of the meeting on the need to improve access to care and using all of our workforce capabilities to address the needs of people with mental health disorders. We are following up on the recommendation to pursue registration at the IPS Conference in early October. Angele Moss-Baker is attending the conference on behalf of AMHCA.
We explained that AMHCA and clinical mental health counselors would like to work with APA in any fashion in securing the primacy of behavioral health--by recognizing the value position of behavioral health within the larger health care landscape by policy makers, considering behavioral health as a core measurement of health status, and reformulating primary care to be more “head-first oriented.” We would be pleased to work with APA and other organizations to reframe our overall messaging so that policymakers recognize the value proposition that behavioral health offers to our communities.
We explored the potential for creating a joint APA/AMHCA Task Force that could focus on the need for more interdisciplinary continuum of care discussions and processes that were highlighted, and how clinical mental health counselors can address APA’s needs and the needs of your members.
We also explore other potential bridge-building strategies and durable partnerships such as sharing and posting respective content, offering exhibit space at our conferences or related events, and sponsoring joint webinars where each organization would address a specific topic(s) of interest.
We also provided key documents related to our efforts to pass S. 286 and H.R. 945 to include Mental Health Counselors in the Medicare program, and sought APA’s support.