APA Reflections

This was a great conference and a lot of ideas are still stirring around in my head from the conversations I had over the last several days. I tried to share some thoughts on twitter (@IngramPsychLab) as I went, but I think the biggest take away is the importance of moving stigma research beyond correlations with attitudes about intention to seek.

Promoting engagement in psychotherapy needs to expand to behavioral correlates for us to understand the role stigma plays. It also became really clear to me that stigma should be couched as a health disparity barrier and that research on behaviors associated with self-stigma should also expand to encapsulate health psychology and the preventable impacts that it has.  This is a very real, very evident, and very serious impact of stigma and the more we do to bring this component of it to the forefront of stigma research the more attention I hope we can generate on changing the culture around mental illness. There were lots of exciting conversations that happened surrounding next-steps for this at the conference – stay tuned!