The SIG remains active during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with an updated SIG page on the ACLP website and a well-attended monthly journal club meeting.

Group members were featured across a number of emergency psychiatry presentations—both live and recorded—during CLP 2021, on topics including agitation management; ICU presentations to psychiatric emergency departments; ketamine following suicide attempts; and emergency department presentations in the COVID-19 era, to name a few.

Efforts will soon commence to organize and mobilize SIG-sponsored submissions for CLP 2022 (with most members hoping for an in-person event in November).

The SIG experienced a change in leadership during the last annual meeting; Scott Simpson, MD, MPH, FACLP, stepped down from his co-chair role after years of transformational leadership. Dr. Simpson continues in his role as the ACLP representative on the board of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry. Julie Owen, MD, MBA, is excited to fill the SIG co-chair role after a stint as the inaugural Early Career Representative.

The SIG is currently recruiting for a new Early Career Representative, a leadership position that has aimed to promote early career involvement and mentorship. Interested individuals are invited to contact SIG leadership for more information (see webpage). The SIG will continue to prioritize establishing formal mentorship opportunities, networking for research collaboration, and increasing discussion about clinical practices on the listserv.

Visit the Emergency Psychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

The SIG welcomes new and established members for another exciting year of scholarly work and patient advocacy during the challenging times of the HIV and COVID-19 pandemics.

During 2021, our SIG members presented symposia on how to deliver HIV prevention and care to transgender people, as well as how telepsychiatry is shaping the delivery of mental health care to people living with HIV in the US and abroad.

We especially thank our SIG member John Grimaldi, MD, who continues to maintain our HIV psychiatry annotated bibliography on ACLP’s website, while our SIG experts are joining efforts in ACLP’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Presidential Task Force to target stigma and facilitate the inclusion of multicultural psychiatrists, which is one of our major priorities.

We are pleased to announce the publication of our new textbook HIV Psychiatry—A Practical Guide for Clinicians, which was edited by James Bourgeois, MD, OD, FACLP, and Mary Ann Cohen, MD, FACLP, as well as our third-year Georgetown medical student, Getrude Makurumidze.

Our current goals are to develop presentations and scientific articles on the interface between HIV and neurocognitive disorders, COVID-19, substance use disorders, and neuropsychiatric side-effects from antiretrovirals, among other relevant topics. We have also been invited to produce the first pocket guide on HIV psychiatry to provide more help for busy clinicians and enable them to gain access to high-quality evidence-based information at their fingertips.

We are grateful for the invaluable efforts of Dr. Cohen and Kelly Cozza, MD, FACLP, who are stepping down as our SIG chairs after decades of dedicated advocacy targeted at prevention of HIV transmission and comprehensive and compassionate care for people living with HIV while welcoming our new chairs in our mission to advocate for improved HIV prevention and care in the new pandemic era of HIV and COVID-19.

Visit the HIV/AIDS Psychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

The SIG continues to build its membership and identify ways to contribute to the ACLP community. SIG members have a diverse array of interests and areas of expertise within integrative medicine, including nutritional psychiatry, environmental psychiatry, and mind and body practices. Some in our group have undergone rigorous training in integrative medicine practices and theory, have published books on integrative medicine topics, or are integrative medicine educators, while others have joined the SIG because of their desire to learn more about the field.

After a successful presentation at CLP 2021 (What you don’t know can kill you: Complementary/Alternative Integrative Medicine for C-L Psychiatrists), our SIG plans to continue to identify topics that would be of value and interest to others at ACLP.

Visit the Integrative Medicine SIG page on the Academy website here.

The SIG consists of ACLP members who have either completed combined training (family medicine-psychiatry, internal medicine-psychiatry, pediatrics-psychiatry, neurology-psychiatry) or who are practicing in the field of integrated medical-psychiatric care.  

The SIG aims to bring ACLP members together to discuss topics such as building careers that integrate medicine and psychiatry, research initiatives, and educational projects exploring this critical interface. 

We are incredibly excited to have recently added members of the Medical-Psychiatry Unit Consortium to the ACLP and the Medicine and Psychiatry SIG.

The SIG seeks members to collaborate on quality abstracts for workshops and papers for consideration at CLP 2022. We will also be offering an Updates in Internal Medicine preconference skills course abstract for consideration.  

SIG members interested in potentially presenting an innovative medical and psychiatric care model may also submit an abstract to the 2022 Association of Medicine and Psychiatry’s annual meeting.

As the SIG grows, we are looking to better utilize our landing page on the ACLP website. As a result, we seek appropriate content for posting that members will find helpful. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with Tom Heinrich at theinric@mcw.edu with questions.

The SIG had a productive year and each task group has met the goals established at the ACLP 2021 annual meeting. The SIG has successfully met every two months via Zoom, and continues to work on the development and expansion of three task forces, reflective of the SIG’s mission.

As of March 2021, Jennifer Erickson, DO, stepped down as co-chair, and Inder Kalra, MD, has taken on the role. We thank Jen for her remarkable leadership by being integral in helping this SIG build its membership and achieve its mission goals since she took on the co-chair role in 2016. We welcome Inder, who has worked alongside Jen and Durga over the past six years to help grow the SIG and organize projects taken on by our task groups.

Our task groups are busily working away on designated projects and being diligent about maintaining deadlines for scholarly products. Below are their updates:

SIG-sponsored symposia task force: Currently under the leadership of Kamalika Roy, MD, the task force has expanded its participants and continues to prepare abstracts for informative workshops, symposia, and Skills courses for the ACLP 2022 Annual Meeting. The task force had two SIG-sponsored abstracts accepted for presentation at CLP 2021:

• Neuropsychiatric symptomatology of SARS-CoV-2 infection
• Lay off the Keppra? An Evidence-Based & Integrated Update on Neuropsychiatric Effects of AEDs.

Education task force: Jeffrey Zabinski, MD, and Timothy Kiong, MD, have taken the lead on this task force, and group members continue to compile a list of online resources in neuropsychiatry. In collaboration with the Online Education Subcommittee, by CLP 2022 the SIG will have a newly launched website of video lectures, literature references, and neuropsychiatry-focused websites, among other educational resources for Academy member to access.

The SIG has been invited to give an ACLP Education Committee-sponsored case conference on Traumatic Brain Injury to be held on September 14.

Scholarship task force: Under the leadership of Durga Roy, MD, FACLP, Inder Kalra, MD, and Idris Leppla, MD, this task force has successfully led manuscript production. Currently, several scholarship projects are underway including:

• A systematic review on neuropsychiatric symptoms in COVID-19.
• A systematic review on Huntington’s Disease and OCD.
• A cross-institution retrospective chart review research study on the treatment of neuropsychiatric symptoms after TBI.

Additionally, the Academy’s journal, JACLP, has launched its inaugural Neuropsychiatry section and has invited members to submit articles.

Visit the Neuropsychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

The SIG is a dedicated group of professionals focused on the care of people who are dealing with a cancer diagnosis or terminal illness. Our SIG consists mostly of psychiatrists, although we welcome participation from psychologists, advance practice providers, social workers, and other professionals who work in cancer centers.

Members hail from all over the US and beyond. Not only do we gather at the annual ACLP meetings, but we also have virtual meetings throughout the year to discuss difficult cases, new modalities in cancer care, and complexities of delivering care in a cancer center. The goal is to support each other as we care for people with cancer and terminal illness, share helpful clinical information, and problem solve together on how best to promote the mental health and well-being, not only of patients, but also their families and medical teams.

People interested in our SIG’s work may want to learn more about The American Psychosocial Oncology Association at: https://apos-society.org/ APOS is made of various professionals (MDs, PhDs, LCSWs and others) who take care of people with cancer and their families, with attention to not only clinical work but also research to identify needs and test interventions and then promote the highest-level psychosocial care in cancer centers across the country.

Visit the Palliative Medicine & Psycho-Oncology SIG page on the Academy website here.

Despite the continued challenges of COVID-19 and the need for online interactions, the SIG maintains high levels of interest. We have multiple participants at each meeting and receive frequent requests to be added to the group. Susan Turkel, MD, FACLP, and Laura Markley, MD, FACLP, were featured in the January ACLP News for reviewing and proposing changes to the American Psychiatric Association draft Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients with Eating Disorders.

During our recent SIG virtual meeting the innumerable contributions of Dr. Turkel, co-founder of the SIG as well as co-leader through the end of 2021, were celebrated. The group was informed of her decision to step down and Julie Jacobson, MD, was introduced as the new co-leader. We then had a lively discussion of challenges in the current health care environment and solutions being tried. We reviewed the sponsored presentations by SIG members at CLP 2021, including a Fundamentals course and SIG-sponsored pre-conference course. A wide breadth of topics for possible submission at CLP 2022 were discussed.

We continue to share a listserv with the Physically Ill Child Committee of the American Academy of Child-Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) due to the efforts and support of Maryland Pao, MD, FACLP. The linkage with this highly active forum allows shared communication between the two groups with similar interests. Members of either (or both) AACAP and ACLP committees use the listserv to review clinical and administrative topics and put forward other questions for collective advice and support. We plan to expand the use of our own internal listserv as a networking and collaborating resource for members.

Visit the Pediatric C-L Psychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

We are honored to share the recent work of our SIG members:

• An Economic Evaluation of a Proactive Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry Pilot…: Ready for publication in the Academy’s journal JACLP, and reported in ACLP News February, an analysis conducted by Brian Bronson, MD, and colleagues at the State University of New York at Stony Brook explores the return-on-investment of a Proactive C-L Psychiatry pilot, providing further evidence for the cost-effectiveness of Proactive C-L Psychiatry.
• Social Factors in Proactive Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: This accepted session for the APA Annual Meeting in New Orleans will be presented by Rebecca Weintraub Brendel, MD, JD, FACLP, Sofia Matta, MD, Rusty Baik, MD, and Michael Sharpe, MD, FACLP. It is scheduled for Saturday, May 21, 8–9:30 AM.
• Proactive Integrated Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: Applying the Biopsychosocial Model to C-L Psychiatry (title pending): This invited presidential symposium will be presented at the World Congress of the International College of Psychosomatic Medicine (September 7–9) in Rochester, NY.
• Proactive C-L Psychiatry Directory: Our SIG has also created a directory of established and developing Proactive C-L Psychiatry services. This resource is available for SIG members interested in pursuing professional or academic consultation.

The SIG website remains up-to-date with the latest publications and resources. We always welcome suggestions for additional resources that would aid the implementation and dissemination of this model. We also invite you to join our SIG for access to the listserv and to receive updates on news and opportunities for collaboration.

Visit the Proactive C-L Psychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

The SIG is interested in building its membership and engagement in the upcoming year through regular virtual meetings and an in-person gathering at the CLP 2022.

While COVID-19 has had a significant impact on how and what we study, SIG members continue to be active in conducting research in C-L Psychiatry. During the pandemic, this work has had great impact on how we understand and manage the neuropsychiatric impacts from COVID-19 in the acute and post-acute phases. SIG members have presented their work at academic meetings, including the virtual CLP 2021, and also published in numerous journals.

As a SIG, our aims are to support the development of new researchers, facilitate the work of those already engaged in the field, and promote C-L Psychiatry research findings to bridge the gap between research and practice.

In the coming year, we hope to organize a virtual session for trainees considering research as part of their career and a works-in-progress session for those looking to get feedback on a research project, grant application, or paper.

Please join the SIG if any of this interests you (or if you have ideas for additional activities)! More specifically, if you are interested in participating in a research-focused workshop at CLP 2022, please let us know.

Visit the Research SIG page on the Academy website here.

Given the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, it is no surprise that telemedicine, and telepsychiatry in particular, has been an especially active field. Many C-L psychiatrists who never or rarely used telemedicine before the pandemic were able to incorporate it into their practices more or less seamlessly and to good effect. Many of our SIG members have been very active over the last year or so providing psychiatric consultation by videoconference, producing manuscripts, and developing proposals for Skills courses and workshops for CLP 2022.

Recent accomplishments involving SIG members include:

• Survey of Clinician Experiences of Telepsychiatry and Tele-Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry authored by Adrienne Mishkin, MD, MPH, MS; Stephanie Cheung, MD; Justin Capote, MD; Weijia Fan, MS; and Philip Muskin, MD, MA, FACLP. Dr. Muskin says they are now working on a content analysis of the comments made by participants in the survey.
• From Bob Joseph, MD, MS, FACLP, there’s news that the report Expanding Access to Psychiatric Care: Implementation of Psychiatric e-Consultation and Tele-consultation for Primary Care in a Safety-net Health System is being published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Undeserved.
• James Bourgeois, MD, OD, FACLP, chair, Department of Psychiatry, Baylor Scott & White Health, and colleagues, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, pivoted to 100% telemedicine for outpatient psychiatric services in a period of 10 days! Even with subsequent easing of social distancing requirements, they continued to offer the option of telemedicine services. Since then, a consistent 30%-35% of outpatients continue to have their care provided exclusively by telemedicine. This is a notable achievement and outcome, associated with lower no-show and cancellation rates. A manuscript and CLP 2022 presentation are being developed.

The SIG is working on the development of one or more workshops or Skills courses for CLP 2022 with the aim of inviting one or more other SIGs to work with us to create proposals reflective of the 2022 meeting theme: Making Connections: Inspiring Transformation Through Education.

Visit the Telepsychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

We will continue our monthly meetings. Case discussions remain fascinating and a main advantage of being a SIG member.

More than 60 SIG members have contributed to Transplant Psychiatry: A Case-Based Approach to Clinical Challenges, a 40-chapter book to be published by Springer Publishing later in 2022. We are currently working on the last five chapter revisions. Editors are Paula Zimbrean, MD, FACLP; Yelizaveta Sher, MD, FACLP; Catherine Crone, MD, FACLP; and Andrea DiMartini, MD, FACLP.

A case conference webinar from G. Scott Winder, MD, in collaboration with the Education Committee, is scheduled for March 2022.

Our guidelines group is collaborating with the Evidence-Based Medicine Subcommittee on a consensus paper regarding screening and treatment of depressive disorder in transplantation patients.

Didactics on the inpatient evaluation for transplantation with the American Psychiatric Association is in its final peer review and will be published in spring 2022.

We have been Invited to present at the American Transplantation Congress in Boston, MA, in June 2022. And collaborations with the American Society for Transplantation are ongoing.

SIG working groups are:

Disparities in Transplantation—Leader Dr. Sher: ysher@stanford.edu

Addictive disorders in liver transplantation (includes acute alcoholic hepatitis)—Leader: G. Scott Winder, MD: gwinder@med.umich.edu Also, in collaboration with the Addiction & Toxicology SIG, drawing up a consensus paper on Cannabis in transplantation.

Addictive disorders in transplantation (non-liver)—Leader Sarah Andrews, MD: sarah.andrews@jhmi.edu

Cognitive impairment in transplant candidates and recipients—Leader Dr. Sher: ysher@stanford.edu Also, drawing up a consensus statement on interventions to decrease the risk of delirium in transplant patients.

Standardization of the psychiatric/psychosocial evaluation of transplant candidates—Leader Akhil Shenoy: as5549@columbia.edu

Multiorgan donors—Leader Stephen Potts: stephen.potts@nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk

Education in transplant psychiatry—Leaders: Tim Wong, MD; Dr. Zimbrean. Also, completing a clinical vignette for trainees on the evaluation of an acute liver failure transplant candidate.

Visit the Transplant Psychiatry SIG page on the Academy website here.

The SIG has had an active few years despite last meeting face-to-face in pre-pandemic times. Membership of the group is diverse and spans the globe.

The SIG met during the virtual CLP 2021 period to network, collaborate, and to celebrate the work of its members. SIG members brainstormed topics for future collaborations and solicited volunteers for an early career SIG co-chair; Deepika Sundararaj, MD, volunteered to serve in this role. 

At CLP 2021, symposia on women’s health topics were presented, including substance use disorders, women’s health across the lifespan, and human trafficking—providing opportunities for ACLP members to hear about critically important topics in women’s health. Additionally, numerous posters and oral papers related to women’s health were presented.

SIG members have collaborated on academic projects including two papers related to trauma-informed care that are in process of submission. Other activities included submissions to other conferences.

Leveraging synergies with Marce Society of North America, many members of the SIG have been participating in a women’s mental health curriculum that was successfully implemented this year jointly by women’s health fellowships and C-L Psychiatry fellowships across the country, highlighting a key inter-organizational collaboration. These inter-institutional partnerships have led to a network of faculty and trainees who are eager to collaborate on projects moving forward.

The SIG has an established listserv for communication throughout the year. The SIG values discussions around academic collaborations, case discussions, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. The SIG will continue to provide opportunities to network and collaborate on projects. Please be in touch if you wish to be included in our listserv.

Visit the Women’s Health SIG page on the Academy website here.