In the last issue of TAP I promised that I would get back to you with our final revenue figures for the Atlanta meetings. As expected, we once again had a sizable loss of $178,000, although this was not quite as bad as the 2007 loss of $187,000 in Denver: Unfortunately, these figures only confirm the findings and recommendations of our Task Force on the Future of the Spring Meetings, which I reported to you in the last issue of TAP. We now have had five consecutive years of six figure losses from the spring meetings. If we are to maintain these meetings, and I hope that we can, we have to hold them only in those cities where we have been consistently successful in the past, and they will have to meet the attendance and revenue guidelines we have established.

While I have your attention, I'd like to address a nagging question, which I hear from some members. I must dispute the notion that some may have that separating our spring meetings from those of the American Psychiatric Association has led to the ongoing difficulties with these meetings. This is simply not true. For example, during the last two years that we met in conjunction with APA (2000-01) we had an average attendance of 535 members and an average total of attendance of 897. Over the course of the next four years (2002-05), we had an average attendance of 536 members and an average total attendance of 1,017. Obviously the factors interfering with the lack of profitability of the meetings are complicated and multifactorial, but it is quite unlikely they are related in any clear way to the disjunction from the meetings of the APA.

In future TAP issues, I will discuss a number of additional ideas and misconceptions about the spring meetings.