Partnerships across professions accelerate the field’s progress

[This article is part of the 2023 Trends Report]

Many of the mental health and behavior challenges that psychologists explore have a huge societal component. Poverty, exposure to violence and racism, inequities in education and the justice system, and international conflicts such as the war in Ukraine affect mental health in ways that span geographical, societal, and professional boundaries.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that, going into 2023, psychologists are increasingly tackling complex social issues and working toward effective solutions by coming to the table with each other and other professionals, and even reaching across borders.

These efforts, among others, include supporting refugees and victims of war, combating police violence, advocating for gun control, and fighting misinformation and disinformation. To do the work, psychologists are partnering with other mental health and medical professionals, journalists, policymakers, and each other.

“There is power in numbers,” said Amanda Clinton, MEd, PhD, senior director for the Office of International Affairs at APA. “There is power in voice. There is power in finding where we overlap and how we can share that.”

Clinton and her team have connections all over the globe: psychologists fighting climate change, psychologists working with war refugees, and psychologists trying to nurture professional development in countries where mental health is underresourced. The key to tackling these big problems with international partners, Clinton said, is to avoid coming in as though the United States has all the answers. In fact, the value often flows from less-resourced countries to more-resourced ones.

[Related: Talking to kids about the war in Ukraine]

“If we want to have really meaningful benefits for humanity, these kinds of interactions with other people outside of North America are going to provide us better insights into the challenges that humanity is facing,” Clinton said.

For example, the Office of International Affairs has had a long-standing relationship with psychological scientists in Ukraine through the Global Psychology Alliance (GPA), a network of psychological associations from 70 different countries. When Russian forces invaded their country, Ukrainian psychologists were able to broadcast their needs: At first, APA provided resources from Division 19 (Society for Military Psychology) for families separated by military service, and then later provided support for scientists within Ukraine trying to preserve their research in the middle of war. Meanwhile, members of the GPA from nearby countries had needs of their own. Psychologists in Romania, Poland, and Germany requested resources for multicultural education as refugees arrived at their borders, and colleagues from nations that have recently experienced war responded with their hard-earned expertise.

[Related: The role of psychological warfare in the battle for Ukraine]

“It was like a stone-in-the-water sort of ripple effect,” Clinton said. “We could help many of our partners, and they could inform us.”

[Related: Speaking of Psychology: Surviving the trauma of war in Ukraine]

Relationships are also at the heart of APA’s collaborations with fellow organizations, said Luana Bossolo, senior director of strategic public engagement and community outreach at APA. APA works with a variety of organizations that have strategic goals overlapping APA’s, from Sesame Workshopopens in new window, which produces Sesame Street, to the Born This Way Foundationopens in new window, which has a mission of supporting youth mental health. APA is also working on a variety of projects combating misinformation and disinformation with partners such as the American Public Health Association and the National Press Club.

One long-running and fruitful collaboration—since 2013—has been with the National Parent Teacher Associationopens in new window (National PTA), Bossolo says. “PTA’s been really wonderful for us in terms of reaching that audience of parents and teachers” with APA’s expertise on mental and behavioral health, Bossolo said.

APA representatives attend National PTA conventions, run Mental Health Awareness Month virtual events, and provide mental health experts to create content for PTA’s newsletters and podcasts. After the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022, these preexisting relationships enabled APA, the PTA, and seven other organizations representing educators and mental health professionals to respond rapidly with an open letter to legislators demanding action against gun violence in paid advertising space in USA Today. Normally, making that kind of joint statement and policy ask would be a slow process, Bossolo said.

“It’s really a huge commitment on multiple levels. You’re making a financial commitment, you’re making a huge public statement, and your organization is taking a huge public stand on a major issue,” she said. But the strong emotions around Uvalde and the preexisting relationships at play made the move frictionless.

“It must have been within two hours that I was able to get to someone and say, ‘We want to do this,’ and they said yes,” Bossolo said.

[Related: Treating trauma in the aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting]

Long-standing relationships helped psychologists have a voice in the legislative response to Uvalde. The passage of the bipartisan Safer Communities Actopens in new window in June 2022 was the first comprehensive gun violence prevention legislation passed by Congress in nearly 30 years, said Katherine McGuire, the chief advocacy officer at APA. “To get the bipartisan act across the finish line, we joined forces with long-term partners, including former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords’s organization, American Academy of Pediatrics, Brady Campaign, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and Sandy Hook Promise, to name a few,” McGuire said. “Our collective goal was to ensure that Congress addresses gun violence as a public health issue and does not stigmatize mental illness.”

The final bill included expansion and funding of mental health services within communities and schools, as well as enhancing federal background checks, funding extreme risk protection order laws, and tightening firearm bans for domestic abusers. The coalition effort helped break through the congressional logjam around gun legislation, McGuire said, creating a space for lawmakers to drop their “all or nothing” stances and instead embrace incremental, science-informed change. APA members sent nearly 3,000 messages to members of Congress advocating for the bill.

In 2023, APA’s Advocacy office and the Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest (BAPPI) are partnering with outside organizations such as Mental Health America and the Eating Disorders Coalition to replicate that win with the Kids Online Safety Actopens in new window, or KOSA (S. 3663). KOSA is another bipartisan bill that would address the safety of minors. The goal, McGuire said, is to increase online parental controls and reporting mechanisms, tighten default privacy and security rules, and allow researchers more access to social media data to study the mental health effects of these networks. The provisions are informed by science out of Division 14 (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) and Division 46 (Society for Media Psychology and Technology), and the effort has also been guided by a 2019 Council Resolution on Children and Adolescent Mental Health, McGuire said. APA and collaborating organizations are pushing for the bill to reach the Senate floor for a vote in 2023.

“In this instance, psychological science was the driver that other partners used as a foundation for their own advocacy efforts and was the glue that held the coalition together,” she said.

Many students, especially students of color, get their start in community colleges, but for those aiming for graduate degrees, the deck is often stacked against them. Increasingly, partnerships between these institutions are ensuring that students have an easier time getting credit for the work they’ve done, ensuring their credits transfer from 2-year to 4-year colleges.

Arizona state universities, for example, work with community colleges through articulation task forces—including faculty from the universities and community colleges. Task force members discuss curricula to ensure the community college courses meet the 4-year college standards, and that the 4-year colleges will honor the credits upon transfer. Without partnerships like this, many 2-year students have had to retake core courses, costing them hard-earned money, making them ineligible to work in labs, and putting them at a disadvantage in competing for admittance to PhD programs.

Only 13% of psychology doctoral degrees are awarded to Latinx students, 8% to Black students, and 0.5% to Native American/Alaska Native students (APA Center for Workforce Studies, Data Tool: Degrees in Psychology). But 51% of community college students identify as non-White, according to the College Board (Research Brief (PDF, 587KB), 2016opens in new window). Supporting these student’s success will be important moving forward, especially as universities strive to increase diversity in their ranks. Right now, those ranks are homogenous in many ways: A recent study found that 80% of all U.S.-trained professors hail from just 20% of universities (Wapman, K. H., et al., Nature, September 2022opens in new window).

Across the country, many instructors in psychology programs are working to make required courses such as research methods available to community college students, and sometimes in creative ways. For example, at Miami Dade College in Florida, psychology faculty spearheaded the creation of a multidiscipline social science research methods course to get around concerns that a psychology-specific course wouldn’t be in high enough demand. The course, launched in 2022, gives associate degree students an opportunity to craft their own research questions and hypotheses (see Reducing barriers for community college students majoring in psychology in the September 2022 issue of the Monitor).

The psychology faculty also work closely with the school’s humanities and natural sciences faculty to craft courses and research opportunities. “It really brings a different layer of not only expertise but inquisitiveness to the student that prepares them well for either the bachelor’s level or to start thinking, ‘What can I add to my experience at a 2-year institution that will help me later?’” says Trinidad Argüelles, EdD, the current psychology convener for the college.

One of the most pressing areas for collaboration in 2023 is combating the inequitable policing of racial and ethnic minorities. The Washington Post police shootings databaseopens in new window shows that police in the United States killed 1,039 people between October 2021 and October 2022. Black people are killed at twice the rate of White people, according to an analysis of that data. APA’s Resolution on Psychology’s Role in Addressing the Impact of, and Change Required With, Police Use of Excessive Force Against People of Color and Other Marginalized Communities in the United States, passed in August 2022, is an example of an effort to spur more partnerships to turn these numbers around. The resolution’s writing group was led by the BAPPI and reviewed by Division 18 (Society for Police and Public Safety), Division 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence), and the Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs.

The resolution calls specifically for collaboration between psychologists, communities, and police departments in altering policing strategies, including identifying functions carried out by police that may be more effectively carried out by other professionals and researching and developing training that encompasses antibias and racial equity strategies, among other efforts. Separately, the APA Presidential Task Force to Reduce Police Violence Against African Americans is working on guidelines for police organizations, with input by community organizations and police department leaders.

Collaboration between scientists, communities, and police has a long history, says Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, a social psychologist and cofounder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equityopens in new window (CPE), which brings data and tools to communities trying to make changes to public safety. Goff stresses that the psychologists aren’t the saviors in the system; he and his team come in to provide tools, but the real effort comes from community members who know, from the inside out, how their neighborhoods work.

The increased public awareness of violence by police, especially against people of color, has brought a lot of new interest to interventions, Goff said. But it’s important to step carefully into this type of work, he added. Poorly thought out interventions can backfire, worsening the problem. For example, granting money to police departments for new training might sound like a great idea, Goff said, but if those trainings aren’t effective, the end result is that “you just gave more money to the people engaging in the problem.”

“These problems are hard,” Goff said. “And we should show up with the humility knowing that generations of folks have tried to solve them and have not yet succeeded.”

CPE does not take money from law enforcement organizations or community groups, maintaining strict financial neutrality. In late 2021, the organization launched a new initiative, the Justice Navigatoropens in new window, which acts as a clearinghouse for data from participating police departments around the country. These data allow for analyses about racial disparities in things like use of force, traffic stops, and other police encounters. CPE works with community partners to use the analyses to reveal and correct policing inequities.

There are four public assessments available from the Justice Navigator so far: Norman, Oklahoma; Sacramento, California; San Diego, California; and San Diego County, California. Each has found that use of force against Black people is 3 to over 4 times higher than against White people, taking into account neighborhood crime rates, poverty, and share of the population.

The work can be slow, and the environment polarizing. Goff and his team are sometimes criticized both by those who dislike any pushback against law enforcement and by those who think their approach does not go far enough. This kind of criticism goes with the territory of tackling hard social issues, Goff said, but making real policy progress is still possible.

“Don’t be cowed by the people who are going to say that the doing of this work is always far inferior to the imagining of this work,” Goff said. “Because the problem is, the people who make that critique only ever imagine.”