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The November 1988 issue of The Psychiatric Times, a monthly newsletter calling itself “The Newspaper of American Psychiatry,” and distributed to nearly 40,000 U.S. psychiatrists (a competitor of the official newsletter of the American Psychiatric Association, The Psychiatric News), carried as its lead story an account of the lawsuit settlement, under the headline Psychologists Win Over Analysts. The opening sentence began: “American psychologists have achieved a victory as a result of an antitrust lawsuit initiated in March 1985.” Bryant Welch was then quoted in the opening paragraph, outlining the terms of the settlement as a sequence of actions that the American and the IPA were now obligated to take and indicating, as well, the monetary compensation to the plaintiffs. It was stated that representatives of the American had declined to comment to the reporter. For my part, I had never been contacted.
Welch then gave a short history of the lawsuit, stressing several sequences: the series of four committees of the American over the decade from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties which had failed to lead to corrective action by the American; the “turning point” that Welch felt was represented by Melvin Sabshin's warning speech to the American in December 1983, followed by the American's tabling of the issue in May 1984 in San Diego; the abortive meetings with the officers of the American in October 1984, again quoting Ed Joseph that this was a “pocketbook issue” on which the American would not yield; and the initiation of the suit itself, followed by a summary statement of the principal arguments on both sides of the antitrust issue. Welch did concede that after the filing of the lawsuit, the defendants had taken some steps to facilitate the admission of psychologists into full psychoanalytic training programs, but he stated that, “typically, the way antitrust litigation is resolved is that the defendants, once the lawsuit is filed, begin to take corrective steps wit