I would again like to welcome you to the 2009 Council meeting. This is going to be an historic meeting, as we begin to make important decisions on our strategic plan that will have far-reaching implications for our association and discipline for years to come. The theme of my presidential year is The Future of Psychology. There are many views on psychology. Lincoln had one view, the best thing about it, it only comes one day at a time. I think he’s the originating of the AA movement maybe. And then there’s my view, which is the best way to predict the future is to create it. And part of what we’re going to do is going to be creating the future.

Psychology is at an important juncture and is in the process of evolution and change to meet the needs for education, practice and science in the 21 st century. With advances in neuroscience, genetics and collaborative healthcare, psychology is more relevant than ever. We need to take advantage of these opportunities through collaboration with other disciplines and the integration of scientific and technological advances.

I’d like to start my talk with a story by Dr. Edwards Deming, who had helped revitalize the Japanese economy after World War II. It’s reported that he consulted with a manufacturer who made the best carburetors for car engines. They were considered the best of the best. The manufacturer was told that if he intended to remain the best, that he should start planning for the next generation of cars that don’t require carburetors, and start making fuel injectors and computerized controls. The manufacturer scoffed and dismissed Dr. Deming’s advice. Dr. Deming visited the manufacturer a few years later and he was close to bankruptcy and shutting down his business. The bewildered manufacturer could not understand why sales were down and why he was having such troubles. I still make the best carburetors in the world, he said, what’s happened? The manufacturer was told that fuel injectors and computerized controls cost less, require less maintenance and are more fuel efficient and will eventually replace all carburetors. The businessman just looked bewildered.

To some degree psychology is in a similar transition. While our old models may be the best of the best, they are often not acceptable in our current environments that we live and work in. In response to these changes there are many areas of psychology that are evolving. We have people who are dropping psychology from their names, like developmental science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and we need to change our traditional ways of practice, science and education that will take advantage of these new opportunities in society. This will require that we come up with some innovative ideas and methods.

In digging around for history about this I found a quote by William James, who, in 1879 said, “A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally it becomes what everybody knows.” Dismissed as trivial, looked at as ridiculous. I wonder what Dr. James would think about our organization now as we move into the 21 st century.

One of the task forces that I have, my initiatives, is on the future of psychology practice. The task force on the future of psychology practice has two broad foci. First, the task force is developing a set of policy recommendations and action plans for implementation by the APA, and you will see them probably in 2010. This work goes hand in hand with the development of the APA Strategic Planning process. Because of our tax status, APA has to focus on the discipline of psychology, and the APA practice organization, our C6 organization, which is funded by practice assessment dollars, can focus on guild issues of psychologists. We are also working with the Committee on the Advancement of Professional Practice to help with their strategic planning process.

I am fortunate to have a wonderful -- this is our office of the future, when we get really efficient. I’m blessed with having a wonderful group of task force members. Dr. Carol Goodheart is the co-chair of the task force. Please stand up, Carol. She has done an incredible amount of work for this and we really appreciate that. Margaret Heldring is the co-chair, and we also have several members of council who are on the task force: Susan McDaniel, if you’ll raise your hand; Jennifer Kelly and Sandy Shullman. Is anybody else on the task force here? Okay. And we’re incredibly supported by APA staff at its very highest level. Katherine Nordal, who is Executive Director for Practice, has been on all of our conference calls; Randy Phelps; Cynthia Belar, the Executive Director of Education, has been involved in this, and we are strongly supported by Joan Freund, on APA staff.

Now second, the task force is the organizing committee for the Summit on the Future of Psychology Practice. We did a logo contest, we’re trying to find a logo for our work. These are some examples. We haven’t decided on them yet, but we had people donate logos. We’re still working on this, but it’s a fun way to get people involved and engaged. The task force is the organizing committee for the Summit on the Future of Psychology Practice, it’ll be held May 14 th through 17 th, 2009. The meeting will also help the task force develop policies and identify opportunities and resources to take advantage of these opportunities. We’ve invited practice leaders from divisions, state associations, APA staff, other practice organizations, government agencies, consumers of psychological services, and business and insurance industries to collaborate in helping us develop a plan for the future of psychology practice. The focus of the summit is going to be on health service practice and psychology practice in organizations. In addition we’re going to focus on psychology economics; any time you want to make changes you have to figure out how to pay for that. And we have cross-cutting themes that are going to be examined in everything that we do. One of those is diversity, evidence-based practice, partnerships that we need to develop, technology and advocacy.

The first day we are going to focus on current issues and future opportunities for the practice of psychology. Our keynote speaker is Dr. Ian Morrison, some of you may have heard him at SLC a few years ago. He’s a futurist and he’s going to talk to us about future trends in healthcare and business, try and broaden our perspective. Our own Dr. Norman Anderson is going to give a talk on healthcare disparities which are critical to consider in the future of practice. And we are going to -- this is a working conference where most of the time is going to be spent in small groups working on these topics.

Day two is about psychology economics. We have Richard Franks, who is an economist from Harvard and part of the Obama Transition Team, is going to speak to us about mental health and healthcare economics. We’re going to have a talk by Tillman Farley, who is a practicing primary care physician in rural Colorado, he primarily treats Hispanic patients, and he has developed what he calls extreme collaboration. He’s incredibly supportive of psychology being in primary care, and he’s going to talk about how we can do that. We have Janet Rhinegold, who’s a consultant to the APA, to talk about marketing and branding.

And then day three is looking to the future, transforming the profession. And we have Elizabeth Gibson, who is a consulting psychologist. She helped transform Best Buy from a bankrupt company to the leading electronics firm in the United States. So we’re very excited about this. If you would like to learn more about this, please come to our lunch on Saturday, where we will give you much more details about this.

Also one of my initiatives is to recognize innovative psychologists who have developed innovative practices. These are people who I consider the average, extraordinary practicing psychologists delivering services out in the public. They receive a presidential citation and there’s a story about their practice in the APA Monitor. We’ve so far identified four of them and there are eight more to go. One is Dr. Mary Alvord from Maryland. She’s involved in group practice with resilience in children and families, she’s integrated technology into multisite practice, just an example. We have another independent practitioner from New York who’s doing primary care psychology in independent practice. Dr. Martinelli is in the VA system, and Dr. Lane Lasaster works in schools and communities. So we are still identifying people. If you think you know of somebody who’s doing a wonderful innovative practice, this includes both institutional and independent practice, I would like to hear about them so that we can consider them for one of these awards.

Now I’d like to talk to you about some principles that I believe can help guide us in the future of psychology health service practice. We need to move from being just health providers to healthcare providers to work in integrated healthcare. If you ask someone off the street, what is a psychologist? Most people will say they either don’t know or that we’re a mental health provider. I was at the Tennessee Legislature a couple weeks ago and I talked to a number of people who had been in the legislature for many years. And I said, I’m a psychologist, and they looked at me and they said, what’s that? I mean, I was shocked. These people represent the citizens of Tennessee, they didn’t really know who we were, what we did. Oh, you’re one of those shrinks, you’re one of those counselors. And so we had a lot of educating to do that I think the public needs to understand. But to succeed in the future psychologists need to broaden their perspectives to be full partners in the healthcare system. This requires us to practice side by side with our medical colleagues and in medical systems of care.

Currently primary care providers treat 70 percent, 70 percent of mental health problems without the assistance of psychologists or any other mental health provider. Primary care providers are the de facto mental health system in this country, primarily because of changes in managed care and over-reliance on medications. Yet we know that research indicates that major health problems like diabetes, heart disease and obesity are due to psychosocial and lifestyle problems, issues that are simply not effectively addressed by the medical profession. Minorities are underserved and elderly patients suffer even more from these systems of care. We’re the profession who knows the most about human behavior and how to change it, yet we’re often not involved in preventing and treating these problems because we’re not seen as a central integral part of the healthcare system. We need to change this.

Second is we need to integrate technology into practice. To participate in integrated healthcare systems we must use electronic health records and other technological advances. There are many electronic health records out there available for use and it’s not clear there’s going to be one standard out there. At Baylor College of Medicine, where I work, we actually have two different systems, one for our private clinics and one for our community health center and hospitals. Using them to document psychological interventions requires knowledge and skill and accurately communicating with a variety of health professionals, yet protecting the sensitive and confidential patient information that we need to for our clients and patients.

I note that the Congress added billions of dollars to address this in the recently passed economic stimulus package, and the question is where is psychology in all of this? It’s time for us to be on the ground floor.

The third area for the future is we need to meet the needs of our diverse society. Our society’s becoming much more culturally and ethnically diverse and psychologists need to provide services to all in America and across the world. There are important cultural differences and implications for our work. While many Americans are fortunate to have health insurance, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that nearly 47 million, or 16 percent of the U.S. population, is without health insurance. And this is on the rise, as we know, with economic turndown. And this doesn’t even include probably the estimated 12 million undocumented people in this country. The Institute of Medicine is releasing a new report next week, February 24 th, entitled, “America’s Uninsured Crisis: Consequences for Health and Healthcare.” And I think this will address some of these issues. The problem is, or the issue is that these people often use emergency rooms and community health centers for their care, again, a place where psychologists frequently do not practice. We need to ensure through education and policy changes that psychologists are properly trained using multicultural principles to work with these populations, and that psychologists are included in funding for these services. And this is something that I want to work on this year in our lobbying and advocacy efforts.

The fourth principle is we need to apply basic and applied scientific evidence to inform our practices. It’s clear that evidence based practice including prescriptive authority is our future. In addition we need to integrate basic science evidence, such as neuroscience, family and process research into our regular practices as well.

My next presidential initiative is a task force on the future of psychological science as a stem discipline. The psychological science is not always viewed as one of the core Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines, despite the fact that we have a lot of relevance to each of those. So this task force, it’s kind of more from what I originally had in mind, but this task force will articulate a clear rationale about why psychology should be a core stem discipline, what are the strategies that we need to do to get us in place and to find that way, what kind of partnerships do we need to develop and what kind of advocacy agenda do we need to develop in order to ensure this. This is a critical thing for our basic scientists because we are often left out of NSF funding and NIH funding because we are not seen as a core part of this. Jack Dovidio is the chair of this task force. We are currently identifying members and selecting members to fill out the task force. And this is supported by both the science and the education directorates. If you get a theme here it’s cross-directorate collaboration, is what I’m trying to do during my presidential year.

The next task force area that I’m working on is Psychology’s Contribution to Ending Homelessness. This idea came from my work, for over 10 years I worked with the homeless. For several years I worked in a shelter that primarily focused on men who lived on the streets, and then I moved to a transition living center for women and children. What was clear from this work was that these people, number one, were homeless for psychological reasons oftentimes. It wasn’t just that they didn’t have a place to stay, oftentimes they didn’t have a place to stay because they had a long history of being physically and sexually abused, they were addicted to substances and sometimes their addictions got them more abused, and they also had severe and persistent mental illness. What we found in our programs was that when we provided them the psychological care, ways to cope with life in more effective ways, that many of these people became productive citizens again. And so this task force is going to look at what are the key psychological factors that contribute to homelessness and what are the interventions that we need to do. We know -- if you listen to the news in D.C. homelessness is hugely on the rise. We have many middle class people who go to work every day and they go home and sleep in their cars. That includes women and children as well.

I was struck by being at Union Station and the number of people who were coming in there and asking for us, you know, to give some food. I hadn’t experienced that in years past, so there’s obviously greater need out here. So that’s what this task force is going to focus on. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful group of people, Norweeta Milburn is the chair, she’s from UCLA. We have a combination of legal, psychological experts, people who are primarily focused in practice in this area, who do research in this area, and we even have a Division 14 person who is a kind of back to work kind of person who’s going to help us, that’s Virginia Schein. The Public Interest Directorate is supporting this, and we’re rolling on this part right now.

The next area that I’ve worked on and many of you know about is the convention within the convention. The convention within the convention is an experiment to try some different programming and format for part of the 2009 convention. There are 37 divisions and six boards and committees who have contributed hours to the CWC. The programming will run from Friday at 12:00 noon through Sunday at 12:00 noon. That way practitioners or scientists could actually fly in on Friday morning, get 16 hours of CE credit and go home on Sunday if they want to. So we designed it to be an efficient way for people to meet their needs. We have themed programming within the CWC, the themes are health, methodology or quantitative psychology, evidence based, child and family, neuropsychology, business of practice, incarceration, and then we have a group of famous psychologists who are there. It looks to be very exciting programming. All of the programming is at least one hour in length, some of it’s two hours. It’s in CE format where one person speaks per hour.

And this is what I heard from the members that they wanted when I was campaigning for president. In running for president I heard many people talk about how the APA convention no longer meets their needs. In moving forward with the CWC I learned more about the APA convention than I ever wanted to know. For example, divisions control about 90 percent of the hours at APA convention, yet there are less than half of our members who are a member of any division. Doing something different for our members seemed like an easy proposition last year -- boy, was I wrong. I’ve spent tremendous time and energy, and with the strong support of the APA Board of Directors, this has become a reality.

However, it became apparent that the structure of the convention significantly limited any changes we wanted to make. The Board of Convention Affairs has been studying these issues. There was a task force that looked at how to meet the needs of science members, and we hired an outside consulting firm to make recommendations, yet we still have not been able to make any changes, significantly, in the convention. My conclusion is that we need to make some fundamental changes in the structure of the convention to meet the needs in the 21 st century for our organization. If you think about it, what does somebody get for their membership that’s tangible? They get the convention, they get the APA Monitor, they get the American Psychologist. They also get wonderful other things, but those are things that people often think about in their membership.

The only group that has the authority to make changes is you, the APA Council, not the Board of Convention Affairs, not the Board of Directors. The council has to make changes if we want this to happen. So we’re going to discuss these issues on Saturday, and it’s my intention that we’ll come up with some much needed changes in the structure of the convention that we can vote on in August of 2009.

A second thing that we are going to do at the convention is that we’re going to have a community day. It’s my belief that we should give back to our communities whenever we meet in them, particularly at our convention sites. So this year I’ve convinced the National Institutes of Health to partner with the APA in having a community day on the role of families in preventing and adapting to HIV/AIDS. Where did this come from? I’ve been a consultant to this group for many years, we have an annual conference in different cities, but NIMH felt it was important to do us with us at the APA convention.

The NIMH will be bringing in some of their top clinical scientists to provide cutting edge information and workshops for community leaders in the Toronto area. This is going to occur on Thursday of the convention and it will be a separate thing. If you want to attend, you’re welcome to, but it’s primarily directed at folks who work in community AIDS organizations.

There is also -- Division 9 is also developing a community day at the convention, and I believe theirs is going to run on Thursday and Friday. Theirs has a little bit different focus, and they intend to bring community people into the APA convention. My hope is that this will become a regular part of our programming, that when we go into a city, that we provide this help and expertise to the members in our communities.

How can psychology help our country in this time of crisis? If you listen to the news it’s all about confidence. Larry Summers, the National Economic Council Director, said the economic challenges are all about psychology -- it was surprising -- all about psychology. The issues that we’re going to confront this weekend go hand in hand with the economic downturn that started in late 2008. While there are real economic problems, including serious hardships for families as evidenced by jobs, stock market and housing losses, the repeated message from many experts is the major contributing factor in the economic downturn is a lack of consumer confidence about the economy. People are worried, therefore they engage in different behaviors.

What can psychology do? What can we do this weekend to help our worry about the economy? What can we do when we leave here to help the nation, to turn consumer confidence around? According to many the crux is the fear of uncertainty. Well, as psychologists we know that there’s lots of research that indicates that humans have a difficult time dealing with uncertainty and having a sense of being out of control in their lives. People get into survival mode and they start constricting their spending, and may stop getting much needed services even when they have -- their businesses are doing well and they have individual income. My wife works in the HR area and she says a lot of the businesses she works with have tons of cash in the bank, they’re simply unwilling to spend it in order to move ahead because of uncertainty.

So my proposal is that we need to create a confidence virus. This may sound unusual, but I think that we as psychologists need to use our expertise in order to create a virus in which we infect the country to turn around the confidence of this country. There are four things that I think we can do. Number one is we need to help people manage uncertainty. We can help the public learn how to embrace the increasing ambiguity of our modern world and to manage uncertainty of change. We as clinicians are experts at this, we do it every day with people as individuals. Why can’t we do it in a larger way? When people feel that they have a sense of control and choice, they can better handle the uncertainty in their lives. This is an excellent time to try out new and different things. People are usually unwilling to try new things in times when they’re happy, but this is a time to try something new. And so we’re going to be asked to do this as part of our strategic planning this weekend as well, is deal with that and help come up.

The second is to counteract negative media messages. We constantly hear from the media that we are in the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. Yet the data don’t support this. For example, in January 2009 unemployment was about 7.2% in this country, it’s now up to about 7.6%. In the Great Depression it was 25%. Those two numbers don’t add up for me. In the Great Depression there were no safety net programs. We have some safety net programs in America for people. So I suggest that you challenge these doomsday messages and offer more helpful ones. If people get overly upset with the news, just like we talked about after 911, turn it off. Turn it off and focus on what they can do positively to cope with their situations.

Third is we need to develop optimism through the application of positive psychology. Focusing on individual strengths and what individuals can do to handle situations brings about a sense of personal control. There are people in here, I can see, who are experts in that in this room, and we need to apply that to help us with these situations both this weekend and later.

So now we’re about changing for the better. We have witnessed a sea change in American politics with the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president. His message of hope and coming together for greater good resonated with the American people and reflects a positive change in our country, in my opinion. APA has much to learn and gain from this message. APA suffers from many internal struggles that mimic the national political scene. Are you a scientist or a practitioner? That sounds to me like are you a republican or a democrat sometimes. Do you practice evidence based practice or traditional practice? Does APA spend enough resources on public interest or do they spend enough resources on science and practice? We need to move beyond these either/or positions and come together for the greater good for our association and profession. This is the opportunity we have, during this weekend, in building our new strategic plan.

We are going to engage in transformational change in some ways. Transformational change is a shift in the culture of an organization resulting from a change in the underlying strategy and process that we’ve done in the past. That’s what we are engaging in in our strategic planning process, and Dr. Norman Anderson is leading us in this. Let me give you an example. (Videos)

In some respects we are in unchartered waters here, with huge economic effects operating on us. Just like the surfer in this video, if we catch the right wave and we stay in the right position, as they would tell you in the curl, we can have the ride of our lives and we can move forward in ways that we are only beginning to imagine.

We are working on transforming this, Dr. Norman Anderson is going to be working on this, and he’s told us about three different issues that we need to deal with. Number one is we need to become disciplined in our spending. Number two is we need to develop strategic goals and initiatives, which we’re going to work on both of those this week. And third we need to develop some accountability. Dr. Anderson is going to talk about those in just a moment.

I want you finally to remember a couple of things. When I’m talking when you come up to the mike they’ll say, “Blessed is he who has nothing to say and gives no verbal proof of the fact.” I hope you don’t conclude that about me today. But I want you to remember that I’m here to serve you and the membership. I have continued the process that was started by Pat DeLeon and sustained by Alan Kazdin, of randomly calling APA members on the phone or emailing them and asking them about their view of APA and what we can do, and I hope that you will do this with the members that you represent. You’re free to contact me any time for suggestions and encouragement, and Alan’s feeling neglected so you can call him for concerns or complaints.

It’s now my great pleasure to introduce the APA CEO, Dr. Norman Anderson.