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No
Auditors Needed
The men present at this initial
meeting do not want to proselyte numerous members, Dr. Menninger
went on. The group must be small to be maneuverable.
Personal friendship and allied ties should not count in inviting
or joining this group. The single item is to promote a
thoughtful, industrious, competent, well-established body of
men who are genuinely interested in advancing psychiatry by
this means.
The emphasis
on work and action was again underscored in Circular Letter
No. 2, dated June 7, 1946. Each member is expected
to be an active participating worker agreeable to carrying out
his assignment, it declared. There is no need
for auditors. There will be much individual work between
meetings... If a member finds work on his committee too time-consuming,
he should withdraw without prejudice.
Not only
were GAP members expected to work, and to work hard, at meetings
and between meetings; they were expected to pay for the privilege
of laboring in the vineyard. Since the organization started
without any outside support, it was anticipated that members
would have to pay their own traveling and hotel expenses for
GAP meetings--subject, perhaps to equalization through a pro-rating
plan. For GAP members in private practice, a double financial
burden was imposed, since time spent at meetings meant loss
of income from fees.
A most heartening
spur to GAP occurred within a month of its founding, in the
form of a $17,000 grant from the Commonwealth Fund to be used
toward defraying expenses during the first year of operation.
This welcome award not only lightened the financial load of
individual members, but encouraged GAP to expand its scope.
While GAP membership was exclusively psychiatric, its spirit
was interdisciplinary. It was hoped from the outset that
committee explorations and reports would be developed with the
aid of expert consultants from other fields--anthropology, psychology,
education, social work, sociology, jurisprudence, etc.
The Commonwealth Fund grant made it possible to pay the expenses
of consultants invited to join in the deliberations of specific
committees. GAP, in the years to follow, was to prove
itself amazingly successful in drawing top experts in virtually
every field of human relations, to serve as consultants to its
several committees, with no reward save the stimulation of a
dynamic group and the satisfaction of collaborating in a useful
enterprise.
One of the
most vexing problems facing GAP was the format of the semi-annual
meetings. Should each concentrate on some particular central
theme, with the various committees concerning themselves with
some special aspect of the general subject? Should each
committee choose its own subject of inquiry, independent of
all the others, and concentrate wholly on its special interest?
Was it possible to harmonize both approaches in drawing up the
agenda for a meeting?
The first
GAP conference held in the Westchester-Biltmore Hotel at Rye,
New York, November 4-6, 1946, was an attempt at compromise.
A central theme was chosen: Psychiatry and Medical Education.
The first day was given over to meetings of the individual GAP
committees, concerned with their own specific topics of study
and discussion. The second and third days were devoted
mainly to the central theme, led by members of the Medical Education
Committee.
The central-theme
format was featured in the next two semi-annual meetings of
GAP. At the Nicollet Hotel in Minneapolis (June 30-July
2, 1947) the general deliberations revolved around State Hospitals,
and at the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel in Asbury Park, New Jersey
(April 16-18, 1948) the central topic was Therapy. This
arrangement did not prove very satisfactory. Many members
felt it tended to interrupt the long-range committee studies
which lay within their special fields of interests and skills,
and involved them in broader or tangential areas where their
potential contribution was minimal or dubious. Other meeting
formats were experimented with in subsequent GAP conferences.
Asbury Park continued to be GAP's meeting ground until the fall
meeting of 1959, when an experimental shift to New York City
was scheduled.
The first
years of GAP were characterized by a sharp accent on it action
goals. Significant accomplishments were recorded on two
fronts: vitalization of the American Psychiatric Association
and the preparation and publication of GAP committee reports
on important psychiatric topics.
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