The membership recently received a most unusual publication from The American, a colorful brochure entitled “Special Care.” It was designed with a single purpose: to open a door for psychoanalysts to communication with employers about their health care coverage for psychiatric illness. To learn how to use it, the Task Force on Research and Information urges you to get a copy of Marketing Psychoanalysis from either the Central Office or your affiliate society. There's no charge.
Market, you say? For psychoanalysis? Difficult times call for extraordinary and vigorous action. Marketing is nothing more than a carefully planned approach to outreach and education that tries to take into account the needs and concerns of the people who make the key decisions. Is that process so different from what psychoanalysts do?
Marketing Psychoanalysis describes the background of The American's marketing program, the rationale, the message, the practical steps to implementation, and a detail example of how a contact with an employer might go. Each affiliate society, however, operates within its own environment, so the first steps toward an outreach program are a thoughtful, in-depth assessment by the whole society of the problems, prioritized objectives, resources, strategy, and tactics of implementing a focused plan of action. We hope that each society will be able to use the thinking in Marketing Psychoanalysis as a springboard to developing a program tailored to its unique ecology. Action may be urgently needed on many fronts to preserve access to psychoanalysis for people in all walks of life—either self-paying or covered by a third party.
We hope that you will be understand the uses and limitations of the “Special Care” brochure. Space and simplicity required that it be elementary at best. Only a working psychoanalyst face to face with an economic decision maker can communicate the fine points of how psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are practices in a given community—for instance, how often and how long patients are seen, how a proper evaluation and selection for treatment are carried out, how quality is assured, and how an employed person can handle the logistics of being in treatment.
Many other materials are available to individual members of affiliate societies from the Central Office or from other sources. A complete list is in Marketing Psychoanalysis.
The American's materials are the product of intensive work by many individuals and committees over the past few years. We have completed the preparation stage and are now at the moment when it is up to our members to reach out and let people know about psychoanalysis.
The ball is in your court!