Meet the Candidates for the Assembly's 2000 Election

ALBERT C. GAW, M.D.

I was born in the Philippines and am now a proud U.S. citizen. My parents were both educators. When our GIs stormed the heavily defended Japanese wall fortress of Intramurus, my father was one of the guerillas who escorted General MacArthur’s troops through the streets of Manila.

My wife, Tina, and I have been married for 33 years. We are blessed with a daughter.

During my residency at the University of Rochester, Strong Memorial Hospital, John Romano, George Engel, and Otto Thaler taught me the biopsychosocial model of health and disease. Their examples—patients, first; teaching, noble; and learning, a lifelong endeavor—continue to inspire me. They showed me that fighting for one’s convictions and professional values defines the essence of personal and professional character. A year of fellowship in community psychiatry at Harvard Medical School solidified my social concerns.

My community accomplishments included the establishment of a nonprofit

• neighborhood health center

• elderly center

• children’s day care center

My 30 years of clinical practice encompass both the public and private sectors. I have taught students and residents at five medical schools. As the medical director of a state hospital, I provide medical leadership on psychosocial rehabilitation to the persistently ill. As professor and director of cross-cultural psychiatry at UMass, I have a leadership role in developing culturally competent curricula.

I have served APA for the past 25 years, including 14 years in the Assembly. I have been a representative of the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society for four years.

During my tenure as chair of the APA Elections Committee, we were able to streamline election procedures, open up electronic telecommunication, and shorten the campaign period.

As cochair of the APA Caucus of VA Psychiatrists, and with the help of the Assembly, at this time two years ago we were able to stop a VA attempt to extend prescriptive authority to nonphysicians.

The new millennium gives us the opportunity to redefine and rededicate ourselves in our calling as psychiatric physicians. Demographic changes, technological advances, managed care, and politics profoundly influence the environment in which we practice.

What should we do?

Egregious for-profit managed care practices must be stopped! While we battle managed care, we also need to be proactive. Lessons from mismanaged care tell us that we can’t afford to let others dictate medical practices. Let our best minds craft a system of care that will provide quality, humane, and accessible mental health services for our nation. This will not be easy, but we can and should act. The Assembly should take the lead.

Assisting the practice issues of our colleagues must be a top APA priority. We need to ensure that psychiatrists have adequate time to provide quality care. We should fight for reimbursement of reasonable fees, the elimination of red tape in the certification of medically necessary services, streamlining of the credentialing process, and the reduction of practitioners’ burden of paperwork. We need to improve communication among our colleagues. We should strengthen our knowledge in neuroscience and psychopharmacology, master psychotherapy and cognitive therapies, and increase our ranks in forensic and community psychiatry. Letting the public know what psychiatrists can uniquely offer must be an ongoing APA priority.

Providing culturally competent care is here to stay. The increasing diversity of our populations requires the rethinking and retooling of our outreach strategies and practices. Let’s put ourselves in the front seat of delivering culturally competent care.

Being technically competent and compassionate alone may not be enough to survive in a competitive practice environment in the 21st century. Future psychiatrists must also be skillful in management, conversant with information technology, knowledgeable about quality assessment, assertive in team leadership, and capable of working with political leaders and other professionals.

As we tighten our financial belt, the Assembly should remain the strong, deliberative organ it is. We need to connect more with our constituents—feel their pulses, joys, pains, and aspirations. The needs of our Canadian members must also be attended to. The Assembly nurtures future APA leaders. Continuous representation for new district branch colleagues, minority and underrepresented groups, women, IMGs, ECPs, and members-in-training is a must. Let our allied organizations help us in the affairs of the Assembly.

APA cannot afford to become "isolationist" just as we are expanding international membership. Let us support our Medical Director’s Office, the Membership Committee, and our Council on International Psychiatry in crafting a new office on international relations.

As the battleground for professional dominance shifts from federal to regional, state, and local arenas, the Assembly and district branches will play an even more critical role in the affairs of our organization. An important responsibility of the recorder is to ensure a governance in which issues are promptly acted upon and that empowers the missions and goals of district branches. I believe I have the experience, temperament, vision, and know-how to help lead the Assembly. I ask for your support and will be extremely honored to be your recorder.

I grew up in Southern California and attended UCLA, where I majored in motion picture production. After a couple of years in graduate school (anatomy/history of medicine), I went to Case Western Reserve University for my M.D. degree. I returned to Los Angeles, where I completed my psychiatry residency at UCLA and psychoanalytic training at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society/Institute. I began an academic pursuit and received an NIMH Career Teacher Award. After several years of teaching at UCLA, I began a full-time private practice, which I have continued. I am an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

As soon as I was able, I joined APA and the Southern California Psychiatric Society. I have served in almost all offices of my district branch, including the presidency. I have also been active in psychoanalytic organizations. I have held offices in my institute, including the presidency. I was a member of the senior faculty, and I am presently the secretary general of the American College of Psychoanalysts. For many years I have been interested in ethics. I have served on the ethics committees of my DB, the psychoanalytic society, and APA. I have been on the APA Ethics Committee since 1992. I am a past chair.

In my spare time I went through the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Academy. I was a member of the Helicopter Mountain Rescue team for about 10 years and worked in various other capacities. I taught mental illness management at the Sheriff’s Academy. I learned how to cook and cooked in a trendy West Hollywood restaurant on weekends for about a year. Feeling bored, I took up flying and earned an instrument rating. Recently, I’ve sold my airplane and settled down a bit. Working for APA has been my most recent interest.

From 1991 to 1995 and from 1996 until the present, I have been a member of the Assembly. My work on the APA Ethics Committee has been challenging and invigorating. I look forward to other challenges. Becoming recorder of the Assembly would be such a challenge.

Economics, leadership, communication: These are the three major issues facing members of the Assembly. As recorder, I will address each of these related matters.

First, as you know, there is a major economic reorganization that will affect all aspects of APA. The Assembly is trimming its own expenditures significantly. We must do this while not decreasing our tasks or our mission. This can be done only by accentuating efficiency. We must sacrifice some of our previously held entitlements such as the open bar at receptions. We must make our travel plans as efficiently as possible and combine meetings wherever possible. Some of these issues have been communicated to you recently by the Assembly leadership. In the next few years, the leadership will have to come up with even more innovative—even if unpleasant—strategies to minimize expenses while expanding our goals. My background in psychiatric organizations, as treasurer and as president, has given me some of the administrative tools that will be necessary to carry out such ventures.

The second issue is the viability of the entire Association. We are in a negative membership balance. Prospective members need to be shown the advantages of APA membership. Current members need to have the advantages of membership reinforced so that they will not drop out. We have to augment our contacts with our members to ensure these goals. I will make it a priority to advocate for enhanced contact by the members of the Assembly with their electorate. We must, first of all, find out what—besides dues—is bugging our members. If such matters can be fixed, we must fix them. If not, we must educate the membership on the subject. All of this requires leadership skill. Assembly members will bear the burden of this endeavor, but I will contribute leadership skills that I have developed in over 25 years of service to psychiatric and psychoanalytic organizations.

There are several reasons why our membership rolls are declining. Many of our members feel the economic pinch and feel that any level of dues is too much. One can’t very well stop one’s rent or one’s telephone or malpractice insurance, so dues gets the hit. Most of us pay dues to many organizations, and the aggregate bill is rather steep. Therefore, we must emphasize that we can do for our members things that they can’t do for themselves. The components, the staff, and the MDO are doing a fantastic job in this regard. But the members must be informed about it. Members of the Assembly must go back to their DBs and inform the members of these issues. If the members don’t know how hard we are working for them, then they won’t have the incentive to pay their dues and preserve their membership in APA. We must tell them what we’ve done for them lately. A great deal of what we do goes as unnoticed as fluoride in the water. We know it prevents cavities but since we don’t have those cavities, we don’t think about the fluoride very much. Members of the Assembly need to make sure that the members, whom they represent, know what we are doing for them.

The third major issue is communication. You deserve to be informed about APA. You especially need to be informed about the actions of the Executive Committee and the Committee on Planning. To the extent that it is possible, you need to know what is happening at the Board of Trustees. As your recorder, I will see to it that you receive such information in a clear and timely manner.

I urge you to vote for me for recorder of the Assembly in May.