2024 President-Elect’s Column 59 (3)

It is an honor to be President-Elect for the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. The goal of this column is to share my four Presidential Initiatives for 2025 and ask you to collaborate with me to co-create their fulfillment. I hope you will share my excitement about them, as they have the capacity to propel us, as a unique Division within APA, to thrive now and in the future.

The SAP Board has approved that our focus will center on these four overlapping and synergistic priorities: (1) furthering the deepening of the understanding and incorporation of identity and culture in the science, practice, and education of psychotherapy and psychotherapy supervision, (2) increasing the global cross-fertilization of psychotherapy research, education, practice, and application, (3) retaining SAP members through their entire professional lifespan by enhancing the perceived value of and engagement in our efforts to make significant contributions to SAP and externally in the field, and (4) having SAP function as the authoritative voice in advancing psychotherapy science, practice, education, and application.  The first two and last of these initiatives are external in focus while the third initiative is internally oriented. We are a mature Division in need of new membership revitalization. I would be delighted to hear your thoughts, recommendations, or reactions to these initiatives. You can backchannel me at stewart.cooper@valpo.edu   More importantly, I invite you to consider actively contributing to our goals. There will be many opportunities for you to do so.

We also will work on other priorities. As one example, APA is moving forward on developing masters level educational competencies while revising doctoral level educational competencies. I will create an SAP Presidential workgroup to keep us updated on ongoing conversations about these along with corollary titling and scope of practice definitions. As a Division, we may want to take advocacy positions.

Please let me know of any other priorities you feel we should focus upon. Your providing details would be helpful.

Together, and rowing in the same direction, we will all contribute to meaningful outcomes on behalf of SAP and our profession.

Stewart E. Cooper, PhD, ABPP

President-Elect of the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy