Science and Accreditation Procedurs

[Allen Ivey]

There is an incredible need for more science in counseling. This article from the American Psychological Society could  be a useful wake up call for both ACA and APA. Standards for accreditation in APA have dropped. While I have raised issues with CACREP now and then, I see them working very hard at improving our standards. In addition, we need a broad-based outcome/accountability based research and a substantial bioscience requirement, plus awareness of what works in EBT. Otherwise, I see ACA and APA increasingly moving to the margins of the helping fields. Social work seems to me to be ahead of us as well in several of these areas.

My experience with APS has been that they have been slow to come to awareness of social justice and multicultural issues. But, I have not checked in with them lately to see if they have made progress. As I bring myself up to date, I'll be back with a report on that issue.

A friend forwarded me the following, which we all need to think about.

Allen

Allen E. Ivey

www.allenivey.com

Dear APS Colleague,    I know you're wildly busy. But I hope you'll join me for a brief bit of reverie. With APS having just turned 21 (Jaeger bombs all around, dude!), it's one of those moments for a stop-and-smell-the-roses look at who we are. What I see in that look is that APS has grown to become the single most important player anywhere in the promotion of psychological science. Here are two recent events to illustrate.   A New Era for Basic Behavioral Science at NIH. The first is the happy outcome of more than a decade of APS work convincing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that basic behavioral science is core to NIH's public health mission and deserves better support. Our mantra has been this: Before you can change behavior, whether in heart disease, mental health, substance abuse, cancer, diabetes and the rest, you need to know the basics of behavior. You need to know about learning, memory, and cognition; about the neuroscience of behavior; about development; about the interplay between genotype and phenotype; about individual and group processes; about the biology of behavior, even of social and clinical behavior; about methodology and evaluation. In sum, you need to know about all the traditional and the new areas of basic psychology that make our science the exciting discipline we know it to be and that make our science a fundamental part of creating a healthier world. That is what Congress and NIH hear whenever APS talks. Congress has been receptive to APS's message from the start, and members of the House and Senate have steadily pressured NIH to make basic behavioral science more of a priority there.    In the past few weeks, NIH to its credit finally said it agreed, in a very concrete way. They are planning a major initiative of a type that we have been long advocating - the Basic Behavioral Science Opportunity Network (OppNet). It still is in the early stages, but OppNet is being put in place to fund new basic behavioral research across all NIH over the next 4-5 years. So far, there is an NIH commitment of $120 million to support it. And a meeting about OppNet last week between new NIH Director Francis Collins and members of Congress suggests there will be more after that. As they say here in Washington (or did before AIG), that's real money. It simply would not have happened without APS. We launched the drive on behalf of basic behavioral science, we kept it going in the face of terrible odds, and we are here, at the dawn of the OppNet era, to continue to advocate for a strong and stable basic behavioral enterprise in the world's premiere public health science agency. Here is a Members-Only sneak preview of a NovemberObserver story on how this new era came to be:http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2574 Accreditation for Clinical Science Training. On the other end of the research spectrum, the second big event is about applying psychology in clinical interventions, and APS's role in both supporting clinical science and informing the public of what works (and what doesn't). This too is the result of years of work. Early in the history of APS, we organized a Summit meeting of clinical psychology programs to address an alarming trend in which more and more cutting-edge treatment research was coming out of our best clinical science laboratories (the good part), while in lesser programs, more and more clinical graduates were being trained without knowledge of those treatments or how to develop new ones (the bad part).    This growing disconnect between science and practice led to the creation of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science, launched by the top clinical training programs and internship centers in the United States and Canada. With APS support, the Academy recently announced an independent accreditation system to certify clinical science programs whose graduates would use proven treatments, train others in these treatments, and become the next generation of clinical researchers to create a bright future for clinical psychology. This new accreditation system was announced in the APS journal, Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI), paired with a passionate editorial by APS Past President Walter Mischel. That's what scientists and the public alike hear when APS talks.    And, boy, are both paying attention! The PSPI issue has been available for only a few weeks, but the firestorm of publicity around it is unprecedented. Already, articles and commentary have appeared in Newsweek, Science, Nature (twice!), the Los Angeles Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Others soon will appear in The Washington Post (a Sunday Op-Ed), USA Today, The New York Times and elsewhere. Plus, we have received incredibly supportive comments from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Veterans Administration, and influential members of Congress, and hundreds of emails have been posted on psychology and non-psychology (e.g., physics!) lists. Among other things, this shows just what an important issue clinical science is not just to academics, but to the general public who are the consumers of mental health services. The Newsweek article was still among the most read and most emailed on Newsweek.com two full weeks after it was posted. That means it was read literally by millions, mainly non-psychologists. Here is a closer look at all the excitement:http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/pspi_coverage.cfm There is much still to do. This accreditation system is just getting started. But I believe in the not too distant future we'll look back at this time as the critical period in shaping modern clinical psychology. Again, this simply wouldn't have happened without APS.    Thanks for taking a few minutes to hear about these important developments. From basic psychological science to clinical applications, the common theme to both these events is that APS stands proudly and effectively for our science. And all of us can stand proudly for APS. Happy 21st to us all.    Best, Alan   ALAN G. KRAUT Executive Director Follow APS on Twitter @PsychScience     ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE  1133 15TH STREET, NW · SUITE 1000 WASHINGTON, DC 20005-2727  USA Tel: +1 202.293.9300 x121 | Fax: +1 202.293.9350 akr...@psychologicalscience.org | www.psychologicalscience.org

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