Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, in a challenge to Bush Administration policies and congressional deal-making, said health care privacy must be “sacrosanct.” The Rhode Island Democrat received the APsaA President's Award for his work on mental health issues.
Speaking at the Winter 2003 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Kennedy said two-thirds of those who need mental health care do not get treatment, “most of all [because] they're worried about the stigma and the shame.” He also noted the added impediments of obtaining insurance reimbursement and finding trained practitioners in the area.
The fight for mental health funding will not be “any easier if you make privacy such a bargaining chip with the powerful insurance industry that in order to get anything passed [in Congress], you give away privacy,” Kennedy said. He further noted that lawsuits were being prepared seeking to overturn the medical privacy regulations set forth in the Bush Administration's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which have been criticized by many privacy advocates on both right and left. APsaA, through the Committee on Government Relations and Insurance, is likely to be a participant in those lawsuits.
Kennedy said that despite growing up in a family with “some sensitivity” to mental health issues, when first elected to Congress he was “terrified someone would find out” about his own ongoing treatment for depression. After three or four years he chose to speak openly about his suffering and mental illness. As a result, he was “bombarded with all the labels and stigmas.” He said it was horrifying.
On the flip side, he said, people he knew well came up after he broached the subject in a Rhode Island speech, saying it had opened the subject up for discussion. Kennedy spoke of legislation he has introduced to provide loan forgiveness and scholarship money for professionals trained to treat children's mental illness. “Children and early childhood development,” he said, “is my passion.”
In prepared remarks, Kennedy said passing mental health parity legislation is the top item on his mental health agenda, although he acknowledged in his delivered speech that it is principally for “severe mental illness.” His prepared statement spoke of parity as a financial bulwark enabling people to have steady jobs and functioning relationships. He described parity legislation as a blow against prejudice against the mentally ill.
Getting the financial resources for brain research and parity, Kennedy said, is “not going to require a lot of new studies and science; it's going to require political will, and so it's going to require organizing politically.”
Awards for Excellence in Journalism were given to Diana K. Sugg of the Baltimore Sun and to Wynne Godley for an article in the London Review of Books.
Sugg, whom illness prevented from attending the ceremony, wrote about teen suicides. In an acceptance note she wrote that she “agonized over” the story for many reasons, “including that some physicians told me I shouldn't even write it,” fearing that bringing the subject out in the open would “normalize” teen suicide or increase its frequency.
Godley wrote a thoughtful, autobiographical story of ill-treatment by British analyst Masud Kahn, whose “personal defects were so severe that he should never under any circumstances have been allowed to practice psychoanalysis.” Godley noted that his ability to write his story came only after his treatment by another “skilled, patient, and selfless” analyst.
The JAPA prizes for 2002 went to Rosemary Balsam and Henry F. Smith.
In her introductory remarks for Balsam's award, Phyllis Tyson said that Balsam's award-winning article, “Integrating Male and Female Elements in a Woman's Gender Identity,” demonstrates “through the analysis of a thirty-year-old woman how the clinical material could be understood in the old ”phallocentric“ way as well as in the new way, adopting ”contemporary concepts of female gender identity.“
Smith, in his paper “Hearing Voices: The Fate of the Analyst's Identifications,” uses clinical examples to explore the “psychic complexities” of the “working analyst's conscious and unconscious identifications with former training analysts, supervisors, teachers, and theorists.”
The CORST Essay Prize in Psychoanalysis and Culture was awarded to Diane O'Donaghue, a professor of archeology at Tufts University and student at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. Her paper “Negotiations of Surface: Archeology Within the Early Strata of Psychoanalysis” explores Freud's early use of the metaphor of archeology in its historical and cultural contexts.
The Ralph E. Roughton Award was given to Elizabeth Auchincloss and Susan Vaughan, coauthors of “Psychoanalysis and Homosexuality: Do We Need a New Theory?”, published in JAPA in 2001.
The Karl A. Menninger Memorial Award for the best paper that has been presented or pre-circulated at an APsaA meeting by a candidate or recent graduate was given to Shahrzad Siassi for the paper “Transcending Early Loss and Bitterness Through Mourning and Forgiveness.”
The Affiliate Council Scientific Paper Prize was presented to Jeffrey Applegate for an essay,
Michael S. Slevin is a Ph.D. candidate in British literature at George Washington University and a second-year academic associate at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the TAP editorial board.
“Re-presenting Winnicott: New Findings From Infancy Research and Neurobiology” Julio Calderon, president-elect of the Affiliate Council, said in presenting the award that Applegate discusses “Winnicott's ideas in light of recent findings from research on infancy, developments in attachment theory, and advances in neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience.” Second prize was given to Susan Stiritz and Britt-Marie Schiller for “Transforming Categories: Genealogies of Virginity and Sainthood” in which, Calderon said, they discuss “how cultural influences are important in the social and psychoanalytic constructions of femininity.”
Edith Sabshin Teaching Awards were given to Stephen E. Risen, James C. Miller, Lorraine D. Siggins, Earle Silben Lawrence S. Cohn, Eric R. Marcus, Robert L. Bergman, Robert L. Welker, Kerry J. Sulkowicz, and Jay Alan Davis. The Sabshin awards are given to outstanding analysts for their contributions in teaching outside their institutes' candidacy programs.