PRE-MEETING FALL 2023
America’s Think Tank for Mental Health
www.ourgap.org
CIRCULAR LETTER #665
DATES OF FUTURE GAP MEETINGS:
Message from the President
2023 November 9–11 Sonesta White Plains Downtown White Plains, New York
Greetings all.
2024 April 4–6 Sonesta White Plains Downtown White Plains, New York November 14–16 Sonesta White Plains Downtown White Plains, New York
GAP OFFICERS: President Calvin R. Sumner, M.D. docsumner@gmail.com President Elect Robert P. Roca, M.D. rroca2@jhmi.edu Secretary Sy A. Saeed, M.D. saeeds@ecu.edu Treasurer Gail E. Robinson, M.D. gail.robinson@utoronto.ca Past President Lawrence S. Gross, M.D. lgross@usc.edu
I hope everyone has enjoyed the summer, and I sincerely hope you’ve taken a little time to enjoy family and friends and to take care of yourselves. Taking care of ourselves is critically important, especially for those in high-pressure professions like medicine. The practice of medicine at any level today is challenging, and the potential toll this takes on the individual is a recurrent focus of national attention. Burnout is a long-term stress reaction that most of us have faced at one time or another in our careers. I would guess that most of us in GAP are survivors, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that all our colleagues will be so fortunate. This isn’t something we talk about because, as physicians, we’re trained to have a certain degree of stoicism. But stigma, professional pressures, regulatory burdens, licensure, and the need for privacy conspire to prevent those most in need of help from getting help, and the causes of precipitating stress go unchanged. It strikes me that GAP could be an essential voice in focusing on systemic and organizational interventions necessary to change the culture of medicine and reduce the toll on individuals. I want to thank all the committees that have updated their statement of purpose posted on the GAP website. Currently, 20 committees have approved or revised their statements of purpose, and 13 committees still have work to do. Apart from updating GAP‘s information on the website, the statements of purpose are living guidance documents for committees. A statement of purpose is different from a mission statement. A mission statement would describe what a committee does and for whom, a concise summary of the purpose and goals. On the other hand, a statement of purpose explains why a committee exists and what it hopes to achieve in the long term. It is a more aspirational statement that goes beyond the committee’s current activities, products, or services. Judging from the volume of emails between GAP members this summer, artificial intelligence (AI) and its implications for the practice of psychiatry have become a very hot topic. The flurry of interest in AI followed the publication of two contrasting points of view on AI in psychiatry in Psychiatric News on June 16, 2023. AI has been around for about 70 years since the term was coined in 1956. AI is a broad field of computer science that creates intelligent agents— systems that can reason, learn, and act autonomously. AI systems are typically trained on large amounts of data to learn how to perform specific tasks, such as playing chess, driving a car, or recognizing objects in images. AI is embedded in many tasks we take for granted, like virtual assistants (Alexa, Siri, et al), image and facial recognition, manufacturing, etc. Recent excitement comes as AI makes closer approximations to artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical type of AI that would have the ability to perform any intellectual task that
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