Division 50 Presidential Panel

Division 50 Presidential Panel: 

Navigating a Fraught Political Landscape as Addiction Psychologists

Key Takeaways

The Division 50 Presidential Panel: Navigating a Fraught Political Landscape as Addiction Psychologists was held during the 2025 American Psychological Convention in Denver, CO, assembled and facilitated by Dr. Susan Collins, 2024-2025 Division 50 President. The panel consisted of students, early-career psychologists, and those more established in their work. Some were tenured; others were on soft money. They spanned clinical work, teaching, research, community leadership, and small business. What was shared was our commitment to and professional home in the field of addiction psychology.

The panelists answered questions about how we show up in the current political context—how we advocate, how we choose where to engage, what keeps us going, and what challenges us.

The Division 50 student committee was helpful in generating on-point questions. Because the beginning of our careers is when we are most vulnerable in many ways, we began with questions coming from students and early career folks.

QUESTION 1: How do we think about place and safety in training and professional development—especially when people are considering geographic moves for personal or political reasons?

RESPONSES:

1. Make a values-based decision that integrates your values of geographical place and safety in the context of training and professional goals.

2. Use resources to carefully research and reflect on how geography -- including pending and current state and local laws -- could impact your work and personal experience in advance of applying for practica/internships/postdocs, because it’s often hard to transfer after you have accepted. Examples:

• Explore with your DCT in advance what is possible to make practica and internships work based on your location and personal and professional needs.
• Consider using a spreadsheet to think through each category that plays a role in the decision and assign each category a weight. For example:
  • Location
  • Clinical population
  • Research 
  • etc.

QUESTION 2: What can students and early-career psychologists do when their research funding or training programs are threatened or terminated?

RESPONSES:

1. Faculty can use their networks to help find creative and additional funding to help keep early career folks in our field during these times of great uncertainty. This may include banding together with other faculty/leaders in different states to help find funding mechanisms and untapped resources across state lines (e.g., T32 openings at other universities).

2. It is important to know that a grant termination can be appealed at NIH. If your grant wasterminated, you must appeal within 30 days. 1/3 of appealed grants were reinstated. Do what you can to advocate for your own and your students’ projects.

3. Faculty should share with POs about the implications of losing funding for students and early-career folks.

4. Work with collaborating faculty/PIs to creatively move funding around to find funding forearly career folks and students.

5. Explore new funding streams at your university that you might not have known about (e.g., if you lose tuition remission funding, can your later-stage students file to be tuition free if ABD? What scholarships or travel funding might exist through different parts of your university or external orgs that you and students have not yet considered if, say, NIH supplements fall through?)

QUESTION 3: More generally, what kinds of support are students and early-career folks needing right now and what kinds of support have been most helpful? 

RESPONSES:

1. Continuing to receive stable, up-to-date communication from leaders about executiveorders/new policies and their impact is needed and helpful to students and early-career folks. 

2. Students and early-career folks should feel empowered to pick their mentorship “a la carte.” Lean on different mentors, be intentional about where you are going for support, with whom you are investing your time, and who you are asking for help/support from.

QUESTION 4: What are some successful ways to diversify a funding portfolio—especially outside federal sources? This question was directed to those on the panel who have direct experience with and advice around successfully securing funding from foundations, local or state government, or industry partners.

RESPONSES:

1. We should be encouraging “citizen psychologists”; Get involved at a community level and volunteer. Volunteer and find the need, get your name out there, and the funding may be in places you don’t expect. By volunteering, you better understand different systems and the people in them and how to serve them. You also become a known entity, and these community-based orgs might contact you when the occasion for fundable work arises. 

2. Diversifying your portfolio is extremely important. Through practicing community engaged research/work, there are likely funding opportunities that are based on relationships and networking in the community that you are trying to serve.

• For example: look for funding at the federal level, state level, and maybe even some private corporation funds. Doing this provides an opportunity to tap different pools funds that are available to different types of applicants (e.g., if you build a small business, there are research grants that are only available to small businesses, explore new mechanisms you might not have considered).

QUESTION 5: What are ways that we, as addiction psychologists and within Division 50 and APA, can effectively and sustainably advocate for our field and the students, research participants, patients, and communities we work with? 

RESPONSES:

1. This moment requires a re-calibration of how leadership is taken on by folks. Our leaders need to think more about how to do the work we are doing in the context ofthe political climate. We should take on leadership roles that lift others up by cultivating and crafting plans to protect others. Leading and thriving is a form of resistance and resilience.

• We need to rethink “productivity” in our field. When we think for ourselves as individuals in terms of productivity, we miss opportunities to work together, we overlook folks who would otherwise not step into leadership roles. We need people to step into leadership positions who care about the work to protect students from harms and also lift them up (e.g., dean positions, admin, community positions, evidence-based policies). 
• This is a moment to think through stepping into roles that may be outside of our comfort zones. What would it mean to be a community that protects us? That protects the most vulnerable in our systems (e.g., patients, students)? 
• Self-care is important to attending to advocacy, so we can better take care of ourselves and our communities. 
  • Managing time spent on social media and the news
  •  Encourage supervisors and PIs to be role models for your students around self-care/managing social media and the news.
  • Find colleagues to consult with.
  • Provide a space for students and trainees to talk about their worries andconcerns. 

2. How do we do this if the system is not set up to incentivize and prioritize folks who are doing important work, advocacy?

• Speaking up to change the culture of academia and incentives that are a part of academia; advocating in your departments for changes (e.g., some faculty at panelists’ university successfully advocated to include community engagement and service to count towards academic promotion). Sometimes these advocacy conversations are easy because the people in positions of power didn’t know and/or want to do better. Sometimes the conversations are hard. Either way, they are a pathway to change. This is an act of resistance.
  • COVID prompted conversations about how systemic evaluation and promotion practices should change, but this rarely was implemented. We need to step into these spaces and voice these concerns. Everything is just people – so if we band together as people to speak out about the need for system changes - we will be better off. 
  • Facilitating community advisory boards can create opportunities for vulnerable community members to participate in advocacy and speak to legislators. Creating opportunities with the communities that you are working with to speak for themselves to help advocate. 

3. Division 50 is granted 2 counsel representatives that work on policy changes. Division 50 members are encouraged to give all 10 of their votes to Division 50 in order to maintainthese 2 positions. Few divisions have 2 positions. Examples of policies worked on bycounsel representatives:

• APA policy on ableism
• Psychological needs of children exposed to disasters
• Response of removing EDI from education
• APA’s policy statement on the use of exclusion and restraints on child incarceration.

QUESTION 5: What ethical dilemmas arise when working in politically influenced healthcare systems?

RESPONSES:

1. Sometimes we have to find [legal, ethical] ways to work around the system or more directly with communities when systems cause harm to patients and communities we serve. “Do it now and apologize later.”

2. When making tough decisions, weigh the conflict of interest and share these dilemmaswith leadership, colleagues, supervisors. 

3. Be transparent. If through this process you find out that your values of working in the best interest of your patients and community over system governance, then you have to make a decision about whether you can continue to work in that setting. 

QUESTION 7: How can others that do not work with patients (not clinical psychologists) advocate?

RESPONSES:

1. Engage in systems-level advocacy. This will look different based on the power that you hold, the systems you are in, the roles you hold. How you advocate depends on your power and privilege. 

2. If you are working in quantitative psychology, for example, use your statistics to advocate for the field, patients, students, research. Follow advocacy from your professional organizations (e.g., Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics sent a letter to congress to protect and preserve access to federal data). Work together with bigger orgs to increase the impact of your efforts.

3. We need to work on general assumptions about what advocacy looks like and why thiswork is important.

4. Talk with your mentors about how to advocate for the things you care about. Consider what might be safe ways to engage in advocacy based on the state you live in and your situation.

• Advocacy does not look one way. There are diverse ways to participate in advocacy and resistance. Examples include: 
  • Writing op eds
  • Getting involved with APA’s advocacy org (APASI): https://updates.apaservices.org/
  • Engaging with your own organization or other local organizations in programs that encourage speaking out through alternative and healing pathways, like the creative arts (e.g., art as resistance and identityexploration).

5. Reaching out to the Division 50 listserv is a great way to connect with others who may have similar strengths and advocacy interests.