Biography
The Finnerty Principle is defined as, "If you want people to join your association, you have to stop pissing them off first." Please tell your colleagues about the Finnerty Principle and share what I've written. Who am I? Here it's only relevant in regards to what I'd do as APA president, and my past history has shown that I'm someone who looks out for the little guy and someone who roots for the underdog. I've made many fellow psychologists smile and feel heard, and I've made some APA leaders scowl. The last time I ran for APA president I stood before the Council of Representatives and urged them to support the needs of psychologists who didn't have APA-accredited internships. While many psychologists are disgusted with the decades-long internship crisis, people want to forget the "survivors," such as the large percentage of psychologists who didn't match to APA-accredited internships. I haven't forgotten them or forsaken them. If health-care reform means more of us will be looking for jobs instead of starting businesses, then we need to advocate for their employment prospects now more than ever. Our largest employer should not be automatically rejecting applications from a large percentage of licensed psychologists, and neither should any other organization. I've started an advocacy group to defend all psychologists, not just the ones who had APA-accredited internships.
Who am I? I'm an independently practicing psychologist who, no matter what health-care reform brings, will always be an independently practicing psychologist. I know what it takes to run a business. I've smelled the flushing spiral of insurance reimbursements. If this election is about experience, that's the experience you want represented on APA's Board of Directors. No matter how small your practice is and no matter what health-care reform may bring, I will always fight to ensure that you can start and run a private practice if you want one, can get on insurance panels if you want to be on them and can continue to receive reimbursement that is consistent with our expertise as psychologists. I will fight to ensure that health-care reform doesn't mean that psychologists are saddled with physician-centric requirements that are irrelevant to what psychology is. It's not our job to act more like physicians; it's our job to educate others about what psychologists are. It's our job to educate organizations about the value of psychologists and make what we do something that is valuable for them. I volunteer on the Public Education Campaign and help to educate the public as APA's Public Education Coordinator for Ohio. Our public education efforts are underfunded and they're out-gunned; it's our job to change that.
Who am I? I'm someone willing to stand up and fight the tough fights. I'm someone who doesn't just accept assumptions without questioning them. I'm someone who looks out for the underdog; I believe responding to the internship crisis should include supporting everyone who made it through the internship crisis instead of hanging them out to dry. Visit Todd Finnertyopens in new window.
Finnerty's candidate statement
When I learned I'd been nominated to run for president again, the first thing I told my wife was "I'm going to lose, but I'm going to have a helluva lot of fun doing it." It's important that there are people willing to stand up and question assumptions that hurt many people in our field. They hurt the thousands placed into non-APA internships in the last few years alone. They hurt the large percentage of licensed psychologists who are barred from jobs simply because their internship wasn't an APA internship. There is no real difference between a psychologist who had an APA internship and a psychologist who didn't. Despite this, the APA Council of Representatives recently issued policies that communicated that accredited internships were required to meet their standard to be a psychologist. I'm running in the hopes of shaking things up and questioning such assumptions. These assumptions hurt people and prevent psychology from innovating. For example, we use class size as a criticism against PsyD programs even though the class sizes are smaller than medical school class sizes and even though there is an unquenchable thirst for psychological services if we could just get people access to them. We beg politicians for a prescription pad even though people have far greater difficulty accessing psychotherapy than accessing a pill, and that has been echoed in the fact that psychotherapy has become a much smaller slice of the mental health treatment "pie." I'm stubborn, but also cheerful and easy to work with. I'm 38 and I'm not going away any time soon. I'll keep coming back time and time again to defend each and every psychologist, not just the ones who had APA-accredited internships. Please join me in a cause that impacts so many of your colleagues by going to All Psychologistsopens in new window.