Suinn announces presidential initiatives

Helping ethnic-minorities, cancer patients tops his agenda for 1999.

By Rebecca A. Clay

New APA President Dick Suinn, PhD, already has experience in large-scale leadership: In the 1970s, he served as mayor of Fort Collins, Colo., home to 100,000 residents.

'That experience was invaluable for teaching me how to get things done, form coalitions and connect policy decisions to people's concerns,' he says.

Suinn will soon be putting that experience to work. He takes on his new role at APA this month, just as he starts easing out of his academic career.

By the end of this academic year, the one-time department head will officially retire from his current position as professor of psychology at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. That will give him plenty of time to focus on his presidential priorities: highlighting psychology's contributions in the area of cancer, making ethnic minorities feel at home in psychology and ensuring that APA's grassroots voices are heard.

Uniting around cancer

At the top of Suinn's list of priorities is his wish to make the public more aware of the major role psychology plays in cancer prevention, research and treatment. Psychologists' work on cancer generally goes unrecognized, says Suinn, from their research, to promoting behavioral changes, to their psychosocial interventions to enhance people's immune systems and quality of life. Cancer patients aren't profiting from psychologists' expertise as much as they should, he believes. There should automatically be a psychologist on every cancer team, he argues.

Although Suinn hasn't worked in the cancer field himself, he has seen cancer's impact firsthand.

'It really hit home when I saw a family friend become a victim,' says Suinn, who has also seen his sister-in-law become a cancer casualty, a promising graduate student have her career ended and a colleague undergo a bone-marrow transplant.

'When I became aware of the catastrophe cancer brings when it invades a life-and realized how many lives it currently invades-it occurred to me that an initiative on cancer was simply the right thing to do.'

To achieve his goal of greater public awareness, Suinn plans to organize a miniconvention on cancer at next summer's APA Annual Convention. In the meantime, he wants psychologists to start sharing their perspectives and expertise on cancer. He is asking APA's divisions and the state psychological associations to produce cancer-related articles in their newsletters, which could form the basis for a resource volume. And he is asking APA's governing boards, committees and divisions to adopt the topic as part of their convention programs.

Ethnic-minority issues

Suinn also wants to make psychology more welcoming to ethnic minorities.

Even though Suinn has been involved in APA governance for more than 20 years, including a stint as a board member in the early 1990s, he still knows how it feels to walk into an environment and be the only person 'who looks different.' Given our society's changing demographics, he believes psychology will become more open to ethnic minorities simply because it must. But he wants to be more proactive in nudging the discipline along.

His own election is a step in the right direction as it symbolizes that minorities can be in leadership roles, says Suinn, who was born in Hawaii and is APA's first Asian-American president. But acting as an encouraging symbol is obviously not enough, he adds.

Reaching out to ethnic-minority students will be one of Suinn's main strategies as he works toward this goal. He has already started visiting campuses to meet with minority graduate students and hopes to visit many more during his one-year term.

'My message to minority students is, `Hang in there, obtain your degree and join us in the field of psychology,''' says Suinn, who was the first in his family to earn a doctorate. 'My message to their programs is, `Well done! You're doing good work in creating an environment that is so responsive to these students.''

Listening to APA's grassroots

Suinn's final priority is to make APA a more welcoming place. Some members, he says, see APA as 'a monolithic structure that is impersonal and difficult to access.'

One possible solution is a Monitor column that would serve as a forum for students and new psychologists, focusing on such topics as surviving your first journal submission rejection or how to be successful in interviewing for an internship or for your first job. Suinn hopes the column will be interactive, encouraging readers to send in both problems and solutions.

Suinn also hopes APA's grassroots will help transform his goals into realities. 'Achieving my priorities will take continuous effort,' he says. 'I'll need the energies of APA's members, staff and leaders; students; educators; practitioners and scientists.'

Rebecca A. Clay is a writer in Washington, D.C.



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