It is a pleasure to serve as your 127th president. This is a most exciting time in our history. As we enter the 21st century, APA is in a period of massive change and transition. The change that I am most pleased about is APA’s ability to provide more direct financial support for worthwhile causes at the district branch and state levels beginning in January 2001.

My journey from district branch, through the Assembly, and onto the Board has made me acutely aware of the need for greater outreach to support our members’ efforts at the local level. Many smaller district branches rely heavily on APA for assistance. We must continually remind ourselves that APA is a membership organization. As such, it is the responsibility of your elected leaders to represent and assist you and your patients in every way we can.

One of my goals, which you will see repeatedly in different versions in these columns, is "Integration." I hope to pull together or unify different member and allied groups. In the past, different segments of our membership have not communicated effectively or worked together sufficiently. When the district branches don’t know what the Assembly is doing and when the Assembly doesn’t know what the Board is doing and few members know what the components are doing, mistrust often occurs. We must find ways to work together closely to achieve our common interests on behalf of our patients and our profession.

Your leaders have initiated multiple efforts to increase direct membership involvement and input into APA governance and other activities. For several years, district branch (DB) presidents-elect have been invited to the Board of Trustees meetings to discuss their concerns. This year additional invitations will be extended to members representing minority groups. The senior vice president and other leaders will continue meeting with all DB presidents-elect during their APA orientation. This is the third year for the Committee on DB Relations composed of APA and DB leaders and the DB Advisory Committee consisting of executive directors. Beginning with the Assembly meeting earlier this month, DB presidents and presidents-elect were seated in the Assembly with their representatives and were able to participate in the meeting—a major change for which I advocated.

While I am pleased with these efforts, more are needed. We must be able to communicate more effectively with individual members at the grass-roots level. In addition to the expanding information available on our Web site, <www.psych.org>, my aim is for each member to receive regular electronic communications describing current APA activities. Our chief information officer is working toward this goal.

It is imperative that APA form close working relationships with external as well as internal groups. For example, at times our relationships with some psychiatric subspecialty organizations have appeared to be more competitive than cooperative. This is intolerable. Better working relationships must be achieved. Meeting with individual organizations is helpful, but it will be even more helpful to identify how all the organizations can best work together. Based on that premise, I initiated the first leadership meeting with allied psychiatric organizations. The meeting will take place June 4 and 5 with the leadership and executive staff of nine organizations.

My interest in integration goes well beyond the efforts outlined above. I look forward to a close working and mutually supportive relationship between members, leadership, and APA staff. I visualize a unified, worldwide, diagnostic nomenclature, working closely with the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) to eliminate the differences between the psychiatric aspects of the next version of the International Classification of Diseases and DSM-V. This project is of mutual interest to WPA leaders with whom it was discussed earlier this year. And I am very excited by the prospect of Freud’s 1895 "Project for a Scientific Psychology" being realized in the not-too-distant future, as cognitive psychology and neuroscience converge. Focusing on these scientific developments, the theme I selected for next year’s annual meeting in New Orleans is "Mind Meets Brain: Integrating Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience."

There is plenty of work ahead for all of us. I hope that you will get involved and share the excitement of furthering our multiple goals.