Psychiatrist and author Eric A. Plaut, M.D., will be the featured speaker at the APA Alliance’s annual luncheon, which is scheduled in conjunction with APA’s annual meeting in Chicago.

The luncheon will be held Tuesday, May 16, at the University Club of Chicago at 76 East Monroe Street.

Plaut, professor emeritus at Northwestern University, is the author of the 1999 book Marx on Suicide (Psychosocial Issues) with Kevin Anderson and the 1993 book Grand Opera: Mirror of the Western Mind. Among the positions he has held are the commissioner of mental health for Illinois from 1976 to 1981 and professor and vice president at Northwestern University Medical School from 1981 to 1984. He is a life fellow of APA.

The Alliance’s luncheon is just one of numerous events the group has scheduled for the annual meeting. A complete schedule will be available at the Alliance’s booth at McMormick Place.

Among the events are two scientific sessions, a workshop and a symposium. The workshop, "Rediscovering Authority in American Life," will be held Monday, May 15, from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. It will be led by Sara Charles, M.D., professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. The workshop will examine the concepts of "authority" and "authoritarianism." Most Americans are ambivalent about authority, in part because they tend to confuse authority with authoritarianism. Some philosophers, she notes, have suggested that we cannot live in a civil society without authority. A case can be made, however, that the United States currently suffers from an authority "default." Discussion at the workshop will include suggestions for rediscovering authority in everyday life, since the appropriate exercise of authority is closely associated with good mental health, says Charles.

At 2 p.m. that same day will be held the symposium "Tragedy and Remedy: Remembering Littleton One Year Later," cosponsored by the Alliance and APA’s Committee on Juvenile Justice Issues. The session will be led by Helen Sacks, M.S.W., an Alliance member and director of a court clinic program for youth needing a psychiatric evaluation in the Juvenile Court of New Haven, Conn., for more than 25 years. She also holds a faculty appointment at the Yale Child Study Center. Other presenters include a group of psychiatrists with wide-ranging experiences in the field of delinquency and a lawyer who has been a galvanizing force in reforming the Court Clinic in Chicago. The presenters will demonstrate the varied and challenging roles for psychiatrists in this forensic specialty.