April 2, 1999

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT: After growing up in Ohio, North Dakota, and New Mexico, I attended the University of Colorado (B.A., 1957; M.D., 1960) and Western Reserve (University Hospitals of Cleveland, Psychiatry, 1963-66). I moved to Dallas into private practice at Timberlawn Psychiatric Center. Since 1980 I have been chief of psychiatry at Baylor University Medical Center. I do inpatient and consultation psychiatry, have an active outpatient practice composed both of hospital follow-up care and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, and am active in hospital administration.

In 1991 I was asked to become medical director of Dallas Mental Health and Mental Retardation, a community mental health center serving a catchment area of 2 million people. I was involved in organizing and strengthening a medical staff of 40 full-time equivalent psychiatrists and was actively involved in program development. I resigned as medical director in 1996, but see patients in the MR-MI clinic.

I am a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and was on the teaching faculty of Timberlawn Psychiatric Center. My primary teaching responsibilities have been the running of consultation and liaison services. I have had extensive experience with medical/surgical issues, especially transplantation.

I am active in the North Texas Chapter (president, 1976) of the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians (the district branch; president, 1995). I am in my third term as an Assembly representative.

I am married with grown children. Mary Nell, my wife and favorite companion, attends professional meetings with me and is office manager of my private practice group of nine psychiatrists and psychologists. We both sing in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Chorus and are active scuba divers.

CANDIDACY STATEMENT: The main goal in APA elections, especially in Assembly elections, is to select for leadership ability. Positions, seniority, accomplishments, recognition, and rewards are of lesser importance, although usually present in abundance in candidates.

The Assembly has been fortunate in recent years in having consistently good leadership. We clearly have able leaders willing to serve, and we seem to have a reasonable ability to select those leaders.

Nonetheless, leadership qualities are difficult to define and identify. One great authority-Pogo-suggested, "I must follow them, for I am their leader." While sarcastic, the statement captures the essential truth that a good leader first strives to represent and serve all the members.

A good leader has many other important qualities. The ability to listen and truly understand viewpoints is essential. A good leader should be able to help people (especially with differing viewpoints) talk, think, and negotiate together. The leader should be able to help clarify points of agreement and disagreement, as well as conceptual differences, and needs to be a skilled negotiator.

In addition, a leader needs to innovate. That is, a leader should be expected to have ideas, especially in terms of new concepts, new viewpoints, and new ways of organizing and analyzing issues and concepts.

Importantly, especially in a large and complex organization, a leader needs to be almost pathologically open and honest in accurately reflecting and reporting the viewpoints of others-to avoid the easy and subtle tendency to reorganize ideas to support a different viewpoint or agenda.

This profile of leadership (incomplete and open to issue) is already probably above and beyond what any of us could accomplish daily without fail. It does present a framework as we do our job as voting Assembly members-deciding which candidates are likely to come the closest to being the leaders we need and want.

Meanwhile, issues abound. The Assembly and all of APA from local to national continue to face rapid change. Fortunately, much of the change is positive. The challenges facing us are formidable and frightening.

Functioning in an environment of rapid change has been and is a stress to APA and has magnified the "disconnect" between APA and its district branches. While the disconnect is, in origin, benign, it demands solutions as issues continue to arise and feelings and disagreements continue to mount. The Assembly needs to be actively involved in the solutions.

The organizational issues at a national level have received much more attention and are hopefully closer to closure. However, both science and consensus for major change have yet to develop.

We need to be permanently alarmed by risks to confidentiality and the wish of some to declare it archaic.

Everyone (governments, insurance companies, and certainly our acknowledged foes) wants to establish guidelines, standards, policies, rules, and laws to force psychiatrists to do whatever. We clearly should be the originators and custodians of guidelines and standards, and we have certainly proven ourselves capable and responsible in such matters.

We need to discard buzzwords, for example, managed care, and espouse clear definitions of what and who is of concern to us and what changes seem to be needed.

As noted-challenging and frightening times. I look forward to continuing to work with you in the Assembly and will be very honored if you choose to elect me to a position of leadership.