Apryl Alexander, PsyD, came to advocacy via her work in the juvenile justice system. In her first faculty role, she was working with adolescents who had committed sexual offenses, and few had ever had any sort of education around affirmative consent or healthy relationships. Though recidivism rates with treatment are low in this population, the youth were put on sex offender registries, sometimes for offenses such as possessing nude pictures of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Alexander realized then that there was more she wanted to do to prevent this problem. What if these young people were given the education and tools they needed to learn about healthy relationships and avoid offending in the first place? What if the laws around the sex offender registry were more in line with science on recidivism?
Fast-forward a few years, and Alexander delivered a Ted Talk to 5,000 attendees at the 2018 TedxMileHigh conference that focused on the importance of comprehensive sex ed as a means of violence prevention. Multiple attendees who were part of community organizations contacted her afterward because they wanted to introduce a revamped bill to include consent and healthy relationships education in K–12 schools—everything she had highlighted in the talk.
“They wanted to make sure to insert that into law,” said Alexander. “And that passed into law a few months later after my talk.”
That type of progress drives Alexander to push for change in any way she can, from doing media interviews to testifying at state capitols. Now an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Alexander also trains students and other psychologists to expand into advocacy and service. She is also chair-elect of the Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest (BAPPI) and on the board of several nonprofits, including Breaking Code Silence, an organization dedicated to ending abuse in privately owned, poorly regulated residential treatment centers and camps for troubled teens.
The Monitor spoke with Alexander about the critical importance of using psychological expertise for the greater good.
Many psychologists have an interest in social justice. What paths can they follow to get involved in advocacy?
Counseling psychology and community psychology have long talked about advocacy and social justice as part of their competencies, but in some spaces this hasn’t been the norm for psychology training.
[Advocacy] could mean thinking about dissemination of your research. We often publish in peer-reviewed journal articles that are behind paywalls. But we can engage in other forms of dissemination, like writing op-eds, writing blogs, and developing podcasts. As a clinician, if you’re noticing problems in your clinical environment, like societal barriers, such as lack of sufficient mental health insurance coverage for your patients, are you showing up at the state capitol? Are you talking with your legislators about those barriers?
Not everybody is going to be marching in the streets. Not everybody is going to be on the news. Think about what is comfortable for you and what is in your wheelhouse.
You talk to the media regularly. What do you see as the value of doing those interviews?
For me, it’s another way to get the message out. In this era of misinformation or disinformation, we need experts bringing psychological science to the table.
In 2018, the University of Denver, my prior institution, developed a program called the Public Impact Fellows program. They took 20 professors from across campus and trained us on public impact scholarship. We learned how to do media interviews and how to articulate ourselves without using a lot of jargon, knowing you’re only going to get maybe 20 seconds on the news. I’ve done over 100 media interviews and appearances in the last three years, so I appreciated training for that. It’s something we don’t do in graduate education in psychology.
It also showed the value that institutions of higher education are now placing on public outreach. When we’re talking about promotion and tenure, we’re always counting journal articles and their impact. Well, some of my colleagues have Ted Talks that have millions of views. How are we counting that as dissemination and reach?
Are students asking for this kind of training?
Yes, they are watching the current iteration of the women’s rights movement, they’ve watched the Black Lives Matter movement, the anti-Asian hate movement, and they’re wanting to step in to do more. They are asking us to integrate social justice into their training, and we need to keep up with that.
When I’m talking to universities about this, they often say there isn’t time and space to create another course. That’s fine and valid, but how do we integrate this in all our coursework? How can we talk about social justice in psychological assessment, antiracism in assessment? We’re seeing people think about ways to integrate these competencies of advocacy, social justice, and policy in coursework, so we don’t have to create new courses.
What other changes are you proud of?
I was able to testify at the state legislature in Colorado to end the practice of licensed mental health practitioners using conversion therapy (the practice of trying to change the sexual orientation of gay or lesbian individuals) with minors. That bill was introduced four years in a row in Colorado. It failed the first three years and passed that final year, so being able to show up time and time again to offer psychology’s perspective on this issue was meaningful for helping young people not face this kind of abuse.
I want current psychologists as well as the next generation of psychologists to think about this whole pathway. It’s taking our research and clinical work a step further and thinking about how we can use what we know to change our society, change the systems that we work in, and change our world.
