The recent events in my home town of New York two weeks ago serve as a reminder that the minor perturbations we have experienced as an organization in the last year are really nothing. We have much to be thankful for including being able to freely associate and assemble as a group of physicians interested in improving and enlarging our ability to serve our patients and our profession. Our thoughts turn to the families in New York, Washington, and across the country who have suffered such terrible loss and anguish.

In the last year we have terminated our agreement with the publisher of Medicine + Psychiatry and are in negotiations with a new publisher; experienced the resignation of our newsletter editor after a brief tenure; searched for and found a new executive director following Amy Genereux's request to be relieved of this responsibility; and participated in the much modified and rather contentious initiative of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine to have consultation psychiatry approved as added qualification specialty in American psychiatry. When I get a chance I will have to ask Bill Yates how he successfully managed to prevent all of these organizational demands from emerging until after his term as presidency had expired!

This letter is meant to assure you that your organization is alive and well. With a new director, a new journal publisher, a less expensive to produce newsletter, and an excellent forward looking executive director prepared to do some strategic planning for the organization I think our organization is poised to grow and prosper. However what I have learned during my period of heightened organizational activity is that there is much work to be done and that the skeleton crew we have in place to accomplish these things is insufficient.

WE MUST ALL GET INVOLVED AND ACTIVE IF WE WISH JOINTLY TRAINED PSYCHIATRIST PHYSICIANS TO HAVE THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE AT THE TABLE OF AMERICAN MEDICINE. WE HAVE UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES AND CAPABILITIES AND NEED TO DEMONSTRATE THIS TO OURSELVES AND TO OUR COLLEAGUES

Here are just a few of the areas you could get involved in:
1) Communication. We must improve communication between members. The tools are in place. We have a list serve and Web page address but the silence on these venues has been deafening. Aside from Lee Tynes' initiative to accumulate a series of taped med/psych lectures there has been virtually no activity on the WEB
2) Relevance. We need to decide what it is we stand for and what it is that we hope to gain from an organization such as ours. How we can create the conditions that will make this possible? Would anyone out there like to construct a meaningful poll of the membership to determine what they need and how successful the organization has been in meeting those needs? This I suppose in organizational jargon would be called strategic planning.
3) Funds. The search for a new executive director was an object lesson regarding organizational politics and economics. We need to do a careful study of how the organization can be strengthened financially. Do we posses intellectual property that is marketable? How do we produce such property? Are there other untapped sources of income?

The organization will be as good as each of us makes it. There is much to be done if we are interested and committed. My perspective is that either we grow and prosper or whither and fold. There is little middle ground. Obviously not everyone agrees with this view. We should at least vigorously debate these issues and try to decide what and who we are as an organization. Let me know if you would like to work on or chair a task force to accomplish one of the above.

See you in November.
Kevin O'Connor