Near the end of my first year of psychiatry residency, while participating in masked protests following George Floyd’s murder, I was forced to reckon not only with the brutalization by police of Black and other minority populations but also with my own family’s trauma. My uncle has schizophrenia and was shot by police in the summer of 2000. Although the details of his experience are still painful to recall, our family was fortunate that he lived. I have little doubt that had he been Black, they wouldn’t have stopped with one bullet and that the outcome would have been more lethal. What’s perhaps most tragic about my uncle’s story, I realized, is that it’s far from unique.

People with serious mental illness, particularly if they are Black or brown, are often caught in the crosshairs of a policeman’s gun following a family member’s call to 911. Framed as a pathway to treatment, the horrifying outcomes for people I read about like Joseph DeWayne Robinson, Daniel Prude, and countless others, disturbed me to my core. This part of the system was broken, and I felt that as a young psychiatrist with a family member with serious mental illness who was shot by police, and as one who is treating patients in Brooklyn with similar experiences, I could not sit idly by and do nothing. Compelled to act but not knowing where to start, I began to write. However, translating this experience into a 750-word op-ed was so much harder than I thought. And submitting it for publication felt near impossible.

Attending the APA Fellow Intro to Opinion Writing Workshop not only gave me the support and encouragement to keep moving forward in this process but also taught me that there’s a formulaic approach to successfully completing and publishing an op-ed. Led by Drs. Jack Turban, Lloyd Sederer, and Jessi Gold, who have decades of writing experience and dozens of op-eds among them, they gave very concrete examples of their own writing techniques, which were enormously helpful in restructuring my work. Unaware of what a ‘pitch’ even was, by the end of the workshop and with 1-on-1 guidance in a small breakout room, I practiced giving a pitch of my own. With pride and trepidation, I recently submitted my piece for publication, and I can say with certainty that I would have scrapped this whole endeavor months ago had I not attended this workshop.

If there’s something you strongly believe in or an injustice you know needs to be addressed, learning how to advocate through opinion writing is an invaluable skill to have. I certainly did not have this skill, or at least it did not come naturally, but one of the great opportunities of the APA Fellowship is to learn from national leaders about the writing tools at our disposal and how to use them.

Additional Advocacy Training Resources from APA:

• Advocacy Training: Promoting Mental Health to Policymakers
• Advocacy as Antidote to Burnout: Perspectives From Intern Year
• Learn more about APA/APA Foundation Fellowships