Mary Ann Cohen, MD, FACLP—a member of the Academy for 33 years and an Academy Fellow for 30 of them—has been nominated to become a director of the ACLP Board.

The Academy’s Nominating Committee has put forward her name for election by members at the annual meeting in November.

“My reaction to the nomination was one of both surprise and joy,” says Dr. Cohen. “It is wonderful to have the chance to work with the leadership more directly to address the clinical and educational aspects of C-L Psychiatry as a model for integrated care, diminution of health care disparities, rehumanizing, and bringing compassion for patients and physicians, and the passion for medicine back to patient care.”

If elected, Dr. Cohen would complete the unfinished term of two years vacated by E. Sherwood Brown, MD, PhD, FACLP, who is standing for election as secretary.

Dr. Cohen, a Life Fellow of the ACLP, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a Hackett Award winner, among other distinguished awards, is co-chair of two ACLP SIGs which she founded in 2003, the Bioethics SIG, with nearly 450 members, and the HIV/AIDS Psychiatry SIG, which has grown from 32 founding members to 500 members this year.

Dr. Cohen is in the private practice of psychodynamic psychotherapy, C-L Psychiatry, HIV psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, and geriatric psychiatry and serves as a voluntary clinical professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She served on, or directed, C-L Psychiatry services at two municipal hospitals for 23 years and AIDS psychiatry services at an AIDS nursing home and the Mount Sinai Medical Center for 12 years.

Should she be elected to the Board, Dr. Cohen has in mind a program of goals to achieve:

• To increase the evidence base for the salience and value of the C-L psychiatrist in the context of integrated and collaborative care.
• To differentiate consultation-liaison psychiatry from other forms of integrated care.
• To illustrate the salience of C-L Psychiatry in general.
• To help prevent the shredding of the humanistic basis of the doctor-patient relationship.
• To utilize C-L Psychiatry as the basis for the promotion of humanism in medicine and narrative medicine to meet the challenges of market-driven, productivity-based models of care.
• To utilize the mission of C-L Psychiatry in the teaching, training, and practice of medicine.
• To advocate for parity and decrease mental health stigma.
• To address the tragedy of health care disparities, racism, and discrimination in health care.
• To advocate for caring and more time for care—”10 to 20 minutes is not enough.”
• To advocate for recognition of signs and symptoms of burnout and suicidality in physicians and to develop strategies for its prevention.
• To recognize how pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19 magnify health care disparities and tax the overworked and overwhelmed physician and other health care workers.

Members who nominated Dr. Cohen included César Alfonso, MD, FACLP, Columbia University Medical Center, who wrote: “Dr. Cohen’s enthusiasm and stamina are admirable. She has a brilliant mind which, coupled with superior empathic ability and elegant composure, makes her a productive and creative board member.”

Saba Syed, MD, FACLP, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, wrote: “Dr. Cohen is a dedicated teacher. Over the past 48 years, she has educated and mentored hundreds of trainees, some of whom are leaders in the fields of C-L Psychiatry and Psychodynamic Psychiatry.

“The list includes trainees and early-career psychiatrists from places as near as Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, Columbia University College of Medicine, Fordham University, Mount Sinai, Missouri, New York Medical College, and UCLA; and from places as far as Australia, Bangladesh, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Israel, Korea, Lebanon, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. She currently serves as a mentor to trainees from Chile, Fordham University, Portugal, New York Medical College, and Zimbabwe.

“She is compassionate and has devoted her professional life particularly to persons who are socially deprived, culturally oppressed, and survivors of trauma, discrimination, and stigma. She serves as a role model for empathy, respect, thoughtfulness, and enthusiasm in her clinical practice and teachings.”

Beyond ACLP, Dr. Cohen’s other passion is American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (AAPDPP) for whom she is co-chairing their 2022 66^th annual meeting.

Emphasizing a theme Dr. Cohen has associated herself with in recent times, the program is entitled: How to Replenish a Passion for Medicine: Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry. It has accompanying literature asserting: “Persons with multimorbidities, who constitute most of our patients, benefit from a multidimensional biopsychosocial approach. Changes in systems of health care based on market-driven assembly line models of care have begun to further magnify disparities, erode progress made, undermine physicians’ capacity for empathy, threaten the physician-patient relationship, and decrease both patient and physician satisfaction.”