White Doctors Need Not Apply to AAPL Scholarship

The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) is promoting a scholarship for early career forensic psychiatrists to attend its annual conference in Vancouver, Canada later this year. The Charles Dike Scholarship, established by AAPL in 2021 and named after its now-president, is not, however, available to all young psychiatrists—only “people of color” may apply. Scholarships such as this have become increasingly common among institutions that support diversity, equity, and inclusion by specifically excluding white applicants from consideration.

The AAPL’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts accelerated after a self-critical article was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (JAAPL) in 2019. The authors examined nearly a decade’s worth of AAPL newsletters and found no mentions of the value of diversity in their field.  Despite finding more than 500 JAAPL articles containing references to diversity, the authors further criticized the AAPL because only ten of those articles specifically addressed why diversity is important to their field. They also pointed to broader indicators of “underrepresentation” among black, “Latinx,” Native American, and “LGBTQ” people in the psychiatric field. The solution, the authors argued, was to follow the model of the American Psychiatric Association, which pursued a “structural reorganization plan with inclusivity, diversity, and effectiveness as guiding principles.” The APA also incorporated DEI concepts into its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

The AAPL had anticipated these criticisms, forming a Diversity Committee and creating designated seats on its governing Council for minorities and women before the article was published by JAAPL.

The most recent newsletter from AAPL echoes these sentiments. The incoming medical director for AAPL wrote that “concepts of radical inclusion and attention to diversity” are at the core of AAPL’s educational mission. AAPL’s Membership Engagement, Recruitment, and Retention Task Force extended this mission even further, citing the need for AAPL to engage to a greater degree with social issues, based on insights from its leadership team.

Yet, insights from AAPL’s membership suggest these efforts are quite unpopular. The newsletter also noted a 2022 survey of AAPL’s membership, which found that members were most satisfied with the organization’s professional education, networking opportunities, and scholarly activities. Social issue advocacy ranked lowest. More than one in five members reported that they had considered ending their association with AAPL, and the top reasons were related to disagreement with the organization’s activities, concerns about politicization, and loss of objectivity in search of advocacy.

AAPL’s drift into social justice is clearly driving away some members who object to the discriminatory and political practices that it entails. But another reason might be that these efforts are simply not necessary to meaningfully improve the field, even on some of the race-based metrics outlined by DEI initiatives. In the thirty years prior to these explicit efforts to diversify the field, underrepresentation in psychiatry was actually diminishing. AAPL makes no mention of this organic success, but only of its continued shortcomings and need for structural change.

Yet, structural changes such as diversity policies, DEI committees, and discriminatory eligibility criteria have proven to be as ineffective as they are unfair. Explicitly race-based diversity policies reduce the complexity of psychiatrists and patients alike to their immutable racial characteristics. And these practices do so at the expense of identifying the types of skills and talents that might prove to be innovative or especially worthy of elevation or praise. Despite the mounting evidence against their usefulness, organizations like AAPL continue to insist on expanding DEI into their policies, governance structures, and scholarships.

Elevating characteristics based on race or ethnicity does little to promote excellence in the field or reward exceptional individuals on an even playing field; instead, they create unnecessary cleavages within the medical community. If AAPL continues to ignore its membership by expanding discriminatory practices like race-based scholarships, the divisions among its members will only grow wider—which is precisely the opposite of the welcoming environment that AAPL’s leadership pays lip service when rolling out these efforts.