The new online journal that will be coedited by APA and the American Psychological Association issued its first call for papers last month.

The journal, called Treatment, will accept manuscripts beginning June 1. Its goal is to provide a peer-reviewed, online forum examining different approaches to treating mental disorders and reflecting a positive collaboration between the nation's two leading associations of mental health care providers.

The coeditors are Donald F. Klein, M.D., representing APA, and Martin P. Seligman, Ph.D., representing the American Psychological Association.

Klein is president of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology and a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Seligman is president-elect of the psychological association and a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

"I think the overriding concern is that both groups have a common interest in learning what treatments work for what," Klein told Psychiatric News. "Nowadays with HMO's and such, if you want to support useful treatments, you'd better make sure you've got the goods to back you up."

The new journal has been "the story of getting the Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus to copulate," Seligman quipped. "I think basically the two professions share the common aim of healing human suffering. We have for 50 years been fighting over self-interested guild issues. But in the much larger view we have two great common interests; one is the discovery of scientific knowledge, and the other is the delivery of high-quality care that conforms to that knowledge."

Although guild issues will continue, "if we work together successfully in the fight against managed care and collaborate in disseminating knowledge, the guild issues will be more like irritants rather than matters of life and death, which they sometimes appear to be now," Seligman added.

One of the "most exciting aspects of the journal is that it will be interactive," said Klein. "One of the problems with journals in general is that they are didactic. . . . For every article that goes out, we will establish an e-mail list of readers talking to each other about the article. Hopefully, the authors will participate. If the authors really want to participate, we can establish a chat line." Readers would sign onto a list, he said.

The new journal will provide an excellent format for looking at the two major treatment models: the "medical model" and the "psychoeducational model," said Seligman.

In the medical model, "you look on psychological troubles as illnesses and treat them as diseases," Seligman explained. "In the psychoeducational model you view the patient's problems as a set of symptoms and you treat them by behavior and cognition."

The journal will compare and contrast psychopharmacology and psychotherapy, the medical model and the psychoeducational model, and treatment and prevention, according to Seligman.

Treatment "is what you do after the patient is ill," which, he noted, "is typically the medical model," and "prevention is what you do with people who are at risk before they become ill, and that typically is done in the psychoeducational model."

The electronic nature of the journal will cut publication time by 50 percent, or six months on average, said Klein. "What we intend to do will avoid the length problems a printed journal has. Because we don't have that length problem, we can ask for an expanded abstract that will not [entail] all the technicalities that are so mind-blowing. It may be a 500-word abstract that will describe" the essence of the article.

If the reader wants the full text, it will be but a keystroke away, he noted.

Further information about the journal is available by calling John McDuffie at (202) 682-6221; e-mail: John@appi.org.

(Psychiatric News, May 16, 1997)