I HADN’T BEEN PRESIDENT of anything since the ninth grade, and no one had since asked me to run for anything. It was hard not to notice that my friends were assuming high office: Judy Rodin, for example, was elected president of the Eastern Psychological Association. But I had no knowledge about how this was done. Didn’t scientific honors and national office just come based on some organic acclamation for work accomplished?
“Sandy,” I asked in a moment of naive and abashed candor, “why am I never invited onto prestigious national committees?” My friend, Sandra Scarr, was an all-around professional success, and I envied her. She was chair of the psychology department at the University of Virginia and a prominent researcher on race, poverty, and IQ. She was also politically astute, having evaded the wrath that usually rained down on researchers who found a genetic component to IQ. She was, moreover, the president of the breakaway American Psychological Society.
“These are not knighthoods, Marty. You probably think it is beneath dignity, but scientific honors and national office are not bestowed because you happen to do good science. The dirty little secret is that you have to campaign for them. You have to make allies, and then tell them you want it,” Sandy confided. (I am now informed that this is also true of knighthoods.)
So I decided to run for office. I, quietly and blushing all the while, told a few of my friends that I wanted to be president of the Division of Clinical Psychology, Division 12, the largest unit of the American Psychological Association. On my first try, David Barlow, the leading anxiety-therapy researcher, won by a bit, but on my second try in 1993, I was elected easily.
Being president was fun. I liked the people—other clinical researchers for the most part. I liked the venue—three meetings a year in Washington, DC. And I liked the work—moving the agenda, foisted upon me at Penn, of building good clinical science onto the national stage, where the petty politics of departmental infighting was not so personal. My main issue was building support for evidence-based therapy, and with Dave Barlow we oversaw the publication of an influential book on this topic.1
Standing up for evidence-based therapy was dandy as far as the academic-based governing board of Division 12 was concerned. But as I began to meet the therapists forced to labor under the insurance companies’ reimbursement guidelines derived from efficacy research, I learned that this evidence was not welcome in the trenches. Therapists told me that it provided fodder for the managed care machine that boxed them into overly simple diagnoses, stripped-down brief treatment, lower wages, invasion of patients’ privacy, and, worst, termination of therapy too early, without the relief that longer therapy would produce.
These therapists welcomed the Consumer Reports study. My new-found popularity with therapists—who formed the largest voting bloc in the American Psychological Association—outweighed my sudden unpopularity with my academic peers.
“I could be elected president of APA,” I told Mandy once I saw the CR dataset.
“Go for it,” she said. “My one condition is that we buy a truck, and everywhere you go as president, you take me and the kids.” The family now included Lara, seven, Nikki, almost five, and Darryl, three.
“I AM GOING to run for president of APA, and I need Penn’s help,” I told Judy Rodin, who was back at the University of Pennsylvania as president of the whole place. After a lightning ascent from department chair to dean to provost at Yale, she was not chosen as Yale’s president, and Penn had the good fortune to steal her back.
“I intend to take it seriously, and I would like you to give me a five-year paid leave from Penn. One year to run, 1996, and if elected, three years to serve, 1997–1999, and one year to recover and retool as a scientist.”
“OK,” she told me, “I will grant that in exchange for the copyrights on your Learned Optimism intellectual property. Penn will license these out to schools and corporations, and that will cover the cost of your leave.”
As I left, Judy said, “In the meantime, keep the seat warm for me.”
“I AM THINKING about running for president,” I told Janet Matthews, a member of the APA board of directors. She kept me abreast of the latest detective page-turners and was well disposed toward me.
“Impossible! The candidates line up years in advance, and the order of succession is already designated. Dick Suinn from Colorado has been chosen for next year.”
“Who chose Dick? Isn’t this the only office for which all members of APA can vote?” I asked naively.
“The machine chose Dick, and it has run APA ever since taking it over from the scientists fifteen years ago.” Janet explained that this machine was a coalition of the leaders of the state associations, the activist practitioners from the council of representatives, and, most importantly, the Council for the Advancement of Private Practice and Sciences (CAPPS). The nominees were handpicked and had served the practice coalition for a long time. This had been true every year for the last fifteen, and so only a tiny fraction of the membership even bothered to vote.
“At any rate,” she concluded, “Dick is next, then Stan Moldawsky, the head of CAPPS, then Ron Levant, the next head of CAPPS.”
I was appalled. How did sitting on committees in Washington for a decade and networking with the other committees qualify a person to lead all of American psychology? I determined to defy this smug, self-appointed group and win.
I would give myself no excuse for losing. The candidates campaigned, and so did I—not with buttons (“Win with Suinn”) or brochures but with a speech. The main way to meet the therapists was to attend their state conventions, so starting in early 1996, I went to those in New York, California, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, and Georgia. I had one edge: what my opposition derided as “name recognition,” as if recognition were not earned but somehow a product of Madison Avenue repetition, like “Alka-Seltzer.” So, unlike the other hopefuls, I was invited to give a standing-room-only keynote presentation in each of these states. My speech had a theme: that psychotherapy needed better evidence of its effectiveness, evidence of the sort Consumer Reports had begun to gather, and that science—as the ally of practice—could provide it. I got standing ovations.
I ventured into the lion’s den. In the mid-1970s, a pugnacious no-nonsense psychotherapist named Rogers Wright had led his “dirty dozen,” as they proudly called themselves, into a head-on collision with the science wing over who would run APA. The practitioners organized, a tactic that science regarded as undignified and never bothered to do, and Rogers demanded proportional representation in government. Science was blindsided, and by 1980 the practitioners had won and science took a resentful backseat to practice. Rogers was the founding president and chief organizer of what became CAPPS.
Rogers and I met at a deli in rural California and were both surprised and delighted by what we found. Rogers found a scientist sympathetic to practice, and I found a street fighter who wanted to promote independent practice by bolstering it with good science. Rogers felt that his successors had gone too far in reflexively fighting rather than exploiting science, and to my shock he agreed to campaign for me.
As our family drove through Yellowstone Park in late spring of 1996, I went to a pay phone and found out that I had won the election with almost 10,000 votes, three times as many as my nearest opponent. Conceding, Dick Suinn, not ungraciously, labeled me a “force of nature.”
Yet, of course, the work was only beginning. A few weeks later I had the lightning bolt conversation with my five-year-old daughter, Nikki, that opens this book, and I made up my mind to use my new post to lead the charge for positive psychology. The opposition was fierce from the start, but like my daughter, I was resolute.