I am honored to serve as your president for the year 2007. I follow an august group of people that have served as President: most recently Lillian Comas-Diaz and Jeff Barnett and a group of outstanding presidents preceding them. I am particularly honored to serve as your president during 2007, the 25th year of the Division’s life. Div 42 came into being in January 1982. It is a fitting time, therefore, to review our accomplishments and the changes in Independent Practice. I plan to consider some aspects of those in each of my presidential columns.

We have come a long way. That is so despite the myriad of complaints and problems we all know about and hear about, relentlessly from our colleagues and ourselves, relative to the practice of psychology, we have surely come a long way. When the American Society of Psychologists in Private Practice (ASPP), the forerunner of Div 42, attempted to become a Division of APA, there were many opponents. The Council of Representatives of APA, the body that votes on the admission of a new division, heard the petition for a division of Independent Practice, it turned it down twice. The reason was simple: some members of the earlier divisions felt that this division would shift the balance of APA towards practice. Let us not forget that APA started out as a scientific organization. Private practice was the dirty secret. In 1981, the third vote on ASPP’s petition was positive by a narrow margin and ASPP, with 400 members, became the Division of Independent Practice. Division 42 rapidly became the largest APA division. The face of psychology shifted and evolved. Division 42 became the focal point of the professional involvement of many APA members. A number of Division 42 presidents went on to become APA president, supported in part by the sheer numbers of practitioners who are active in APA.

When many of us went to graduate school, the most respected role for a psychologist was considered to be that of the researcher-scholar. The practice of psychology, although in existence, was not a fact of life, and somehow not the purest psychology. It was not quite legitimate. Twenty-five years later we have a substantial community of psychologists who consider the practice of psychology to be their main responsibility and their area of intellectual discourse. Practice has become a significant part of professional psychology and psychology as a field of study. Division 42 has been one of the forces to make this happen. The division has made an important impact on the practice of psychology.

More specifically, Professional Psychology has achieved a number of things:

1. The Practice Directorate: The Practice Directorate has become a major element within APA. It provides many services for us, from advocacy and legal action to answering questions from practitioners regarding HIPPA. It now has a “find a psychologist” locator system, which all of us should be in. Division 42 has supported its development and given it strength
2. APA practice organization: ( www.APApractice.org ) The practice organization, the companion organization to APA with a C6 tax status has as its sole purpose the promoting of the interests of the practicing psychologist. This would not have been possible twenty-five years ago. Division 42 was a major force behind this development.
3. Organized advocacy: We have gotten our act together and have achieved things that would not have been possible in the past. For example, the practice community worked with other health professional to block a bill (HIMMA) that threatened to dismantle state-level health consumer protection laws established over the past 30 years. Psychologists throughout the country helped defeat this bill.
4. Psychology’ Recognition: Psychology is recognized as a health care profession, by the public and by the government. Psychology has been called to the table in a number of white house conferences and psychologists have been asked to testify in a number of congressional hearings. There are new health care codes which psychologists use which are behavioral health care coded.
5. Expansion of Psychologist’s Roles: Psychologists role has expanded dramatically role has expanded dramatically. Two states and one territory (New Mexico, Louisiana and Guam) have passed prescriptive authority for psychologist’s bill. Whether you see prescriptive authority as important in the psychologist’s armamentarium or not, the fact that we have been able to make this happen indicates that Professional Psychology has the ability to make change in our society. That is an important fact.

Division 42 is the group that strongly represents your interests within APA and outside of it. We work hard to keep our members informed and educated through a variety of means. We publish this newsletter maintain a busy and active listserv and have a website that I urge you to look at for useful information.

On the agenda this year:

Division 42’s Task force on Health Care for the Whole Person, chaired by Jana Martin. The task force will be presenting some materials and suggestions for developing a collaborative practice. Keep your eyes out for announcements from them.
Division 42 representatives will be participating in an interdivisional advocacy summit in February. Lillian Comas-Diaz wrote about this conference in a previous IP. Sponsored by Division 55 (Psychopharmacology), Elaine Levine (Division 55 President) envisions bringing together leaders from the practice divisions and APA experts for this summit in New Mexico. She hopes that the leaders share lessons learned from their successful pursuit of prescriptive authority and how they may impact an expanded advocacy agenda for APA divisions. I will attend this conference and will report back to you.

We will be marking our 25th anniversary at the APA convention this summer. We will have symposia on current trends and future possibilities. We will have workshops on expanding practice and developing new practice areas. We will have a great party!

Come and celebrate with us!

Laura