Roger Peele, M.D.
Campaign statements in Psychiatric News highlight a major problem: candidates want APA to gallop in two dozen directions at once. To become the unifying voice of psychiatrists, however, we must have a unifying mission, that is, achieving the three major rights for the psychiatrically ill:
1. To become as free of their illness as can be achieved with modern treatment.
2. To have equal access to treatment and services.
3. To be able to live in their communities.
To achieve these rights requires overcoming managed care’s actions that deprive the psychiatrically ill. To reverse this deprivation requires courage. Courage includes
• Having the Board record its votes to assure accountability, not hiding behind secrecy.
• Seizing and sustaining every opportunity to legislate and litigate, and giving that effort time and energy, not just giving the members’ money to the cause.
• Taking the moral position that brings collaboration from other organizations truly concerned about patients, as demonstrated during Dr. Harold Eist’s presidency.
• Staying focused on the needs of patients, not spending the plurality of the Board’s time on whether 27 of the 50 Board members should serve on the Board for life (and subsequently avoiding taking a stand!).
Through taking a stand, I have had success in reversing deprivations of the psychiatrically ill. When it became my turn to direct St. Elizabeths Hospital, there had been a 120-year history of not paying working patients, the staffing was inadequate, and the buildings were unsafe. Quickly, I got a million dollars to pay working patients, funding for 400 additional clinicians, and $65 million from Congress for capital improvements (twice APA’s operating budget). APA candidates brag that they have talked to congressmen. What were the results? I have gotten results.
In judging APA’s "accomplishments," ask one question: Are patients better off?
Upon my becoming APA president, the Board’s meetings will be open, their votes known, the members will know how their money is being spent, and—most importantly—I will restore the primary agenda of APA’s 13 founders 155 years ago: explicating and promulgating the needs of the psychiatrically ill!
See the Web site <members.aol.com/RogerPeele/main.html>