The American Association for Social Psychiatry is very excited and pleased about the inauguration of our website. AASP, founded by Dr. John Schwab, has been in existence since 1971. The mission of AASP is to study, teach and promote consciousness of social factors in the psychiatric disorders of our patients and promote an understanding that social factors are core to all behavioral health issues. Since its inception AASP was presided by socially conscious social psychiatry and psychiatry leaders: John J. Schwab, Milton Greenblatt, John J. Carleton, Paul L. Adam, Stanley Dean, Alvin Friedland, Robert Cancro, Gene Usdin, Harold M. Visotsky, Robert L. Leon, Gerald Sarwer-Foner , Roger Peele, Leah Dickstein, Steven Moffic, Pedro Ruiz, Abraham Halpern, Larry Hartmann, Zebulon Taintor, Steven S. Sharfstein, Beverly Fauman, and Charles Huffine. Many of them, and other affiliate AASP members have published and presented on important social psychiatric topics like trauma, immigration, influence of technology and managed care on psychiatry, violence, etc.

The current AASP leadership decided to join our world body, the World Association for Social Psychiatry (WASP) to connect internationally and to allow all our AASP members to become members of WASP. We also decided to bring the organization up-to-date and establish a state of the art website for access to members and those interested in social psychiatry. We are planning to start an ejournal. 

APA accepted all four of our submissions to the annual meeting to be held in Philadelphia May 5-9, 2012. The major theme of this year’s presentations is humanism and human rights. We are proud of bestowing our 1st Humanitarian Award on Robert J. Lifton, M.D. on May 7th during the APA Meetings. 

AASP is dedicated to addressing various social psychiatric issues of all our patients, minorities, women, immigrants, LGBT, families, children, adolescents, young  adults, older adults, etc. and promoting "social" in psychiatry. 

We invite you to join us and promote our AASP.