ICP Newsletter – Summer 2020

Summer, 2020 – Volume 60, Issue 2

Editor, Ada Sinacore, Canada

Print as PDF

Greetings from the Board

• President’s Message
• President-Elect’s  Message
• Secretary-General’s Message

ICP Response to COVID-19

• ICP Ad-hoc COVID-19 Planning Group
  • Webinars – COVID and vulnerable populations
  • ICP voices about the COVID impact

Tributes to Jean Lau Chin

• from Natalie Porter
• from Josephine Tan
• see additional tributes on the ICP website (click here)

ICP Activities

• ICP Webinar Series
• International Leadership Team – An Extraordinary Collaboration

ICP at the United Nations

• ICP signs statement urging a focus on women and climate
• ICP interns speak at a UN Committee of the Family event
• Psychology Day at the United Nations – focus on Multilaterality

Announcements

• ICP issues Statement Against Racism and Inequity
• Nominations for ICP Awards Now Invited
• Global Network of Psychologists for Human Rights
• Call for Service – Volunteer with ICP

Message from the Editor

Member’s News and Comments

• Books published

Students’ Corner

Covid-19 Ad Hoc Group Report

By Josephine Tan, ICP President-Elect

The ICP recently convened a Covid-19 ad hoc group consisting of individuals with an interest in working on issues related to the pandemic.  Members of the group as listed in alphabetical order are: Naoki Asazuma (Japan), Merry Bullock (US), Elaine Congress (US), Florence Denmark (US), Machiko Fukuhara (Japan), Polli Hagenaars (Netherlands), Mary Beth Kenkel (US), Amina Muazzam (Pakistan), Sandra Neil (Australia), Ann Marie O’Roark (US), Roswith Roth (Austria), Élison Santos (Brazil), and Josephine Tan (Canada).

A number of activities have been initiated.  Elaine Congress is organizing Covid-19 webinars, and Élison Santos has been conducting taped interviews with ICP members.  Amina Muazzam is examining the psychological, social, financial, and physical impact of Covid-19 while Sandra Neil is collecting Covid-19 stories in Australia and expanding her work to other areas of the world.  Other initiatives are currently being developed by the group.

We welcome suggestions and ideas from the membership.  Please contact Josephine Tan at jtan@lakeheadu.ca.

ICP Webinars Program – a Growing Resource

By Andrew F. Simon
Chair, Webinar Committee

ICP’s Webinar program got off to a strong start in its first year by bringing a range of topics and presenters to viewers around the world. We’re especially grateful to Debbie Joffe Ellis for getting the program launched in March, 2019. Dr. Joffe Ellis provided a thorough overview and demonstration of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), furthering the ideas and techniques pioneered by her late husband, Albert Ellis. This webinar was offered in collaboration with Seton Hall University and brought a large, online audience, including many of our colleagues in the Caribbean, into the lecture hall to join those attending in-person. More recently, Dr. Joffe Ellis provided a three-part series on how REBT can be applied to the challenges of coping with the global Coronavirus pandemic. This was an example of ICP at its best, responding quickly to needs created by the pandemic and providing a forum in which viewers could benefit from Dr. Joffe Ellis’s counseling expertise. Several hundred participants registered for this series and found it to be both informative and useful. We were especially happy to see such notable engagement from those in Pakistan and India.

Subsequent presentations covered topics directly relevant to ICP’s mission. Michael Stevens and Patricia Perez provided a broad overview of international psychology, highlighting the importance of studying people across nations and cultures. Jean Lau Chin and Josephine Tan presented a session addressing the need for global and diverse leadership. Viewers learned how key components of identity – age, race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status – are central to understanding leadership. Uwe Gielen further explored the theme of identity through his research on the identity of Chinese-Americans. Dr. Gielen provided viewers with an in-depth look into the lives of his young adult population.

Three additional webinars addressed topics consistent with ICP’s commitment to human rights and social justice. Daniel Balva adapted a successful workshop from ICP’s conference in Cadiz last June to a webinar on disability competencies. Viewers learned of the experiences among those with disabilities and how they are often misrepresented in popular culture. We also benefitted from Cary Cherniss’s presentation on the value of emotional intelligence; this talk was based on Dr. Cherniss’s work with leaders and on his book, Leading With Feeling. Crystal Chissell then led an extremely informative webinar on climate change, diet, and human rights. Viewers learned that significant improvement to the climate is possible if we, as a global society, can collectively alter our behavior. This webinar was especially empowering as it highlighted the need for the very talent and expertise of ICP’s membership.

All webinars (with the exception of Stevens and Perez) remain available on the ICP web page and can be accessed at no cost (https://icpweb.org/icp-webinars/). In the coming weeks, look for additional presentations on the effects of the pandemic in indigenous and vulnerable populations. Beyond that, we will continue bringing you experts from around the world. As always, welcome your ideas for new presenters and topics. Please send your suggestions to: andrew.simon@shu.edu.

International Leadership Team – An Extraordinary Exchange: COVID-19 Listserv, Discussion Group and Resource Bank

By Merry Bullock, ICP Secretary-General

For the last 7 weeks, ICP has been participating in a most extraordinary collaborative event. The leaders from 58 national psychology associations, 8 regional associations and 3 international associations (ICP among them) have attended  bi-weekly ZOOM meetings to share information and address COVID-19 issues. Collectively, the group has built a resource bank with more than 190 documents in 15 or more languages, and held discussions of pandemic-related issues such as mental health treatment, domestic violence, mechanisms for establishing helplines, and cultural practices, such as grieving, explanations to children, avoiding stigma, and strategies for public communication.

Most recently, the group heard from experts from WHO and Global Mental Health programs about comprehensive approaches to global mental health as it impacts on current COVID-19 issues and on future trajectories for wellbeing. These experts have included Vikram Patel, and Shekar Saxena from Harvard’s TJ Chan School of Public Health, Mark van Ommerem from the Mental Health and Substance Abuse department of WHO, and other experts from organizations around the world.

The general message from these speakers, that psychologists can and should be involved to move the needle toward greater awareness and action on socio-psychological needs and toward mental health policies to increase access for all, was not new. But what was new was their focused and direct call to psychology to step out or our traditional models and to think globally and expansively on how to address mental health wellbeing for the world’s populations.

For example, Shekhar Saxena, former director of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at WHO and now Professor at Harvard’s TJ Chan School of Public Health spoke broadly on mental wellbeing and COVID-19.  Under the model of a “whole of society” approach, he urged psychologists to contribute to the goal of “building back better” for mental health policy and services of the future by adopting a broader public health approach and working to ensure wide availability of psycho-social support, and support for recovery .

For psychologists this means a shift in our training and usual practice models to adopt a more community-oriented approach. In this envisioned approach the delivery of routine and compartmentalized mental health services would be done by an array of less specialized health care workers, and more specialized care (by psychologists) would be provided only for more “complex” cases. To accomplish this, psychology would need to rethink its education models to add more socio-psychological dimensions, more public health orientation, more policy orientation. Psychology would need to increase its focus to supporting service delivery by less specialized providers, through encouraging task sharing and interprofessional practice, under the belief that there will be a greater impact of our profession if we can begin to address the enormous need to services gap by vastly increasing the number and spread of mental health care providers.

Saxena also pointed out that physical effects of COVID-19 may have a different trajectory than mental health effects, which are expected to grow and remain visible for some time to come. For example, although older and health-compromised populations may be at higher risk for physical effects, mental health risk factors may be greater in younger populations (with job loss, child- and elder-care concerns, and family issues). He also noted that attempts to model future issues predict a large increase in deaths indirectly attributable to COVID-19 from substance and alcohol abuse, and suicide. In part this is due to direct sequelae from COVID-19, and in part is due to a decrease in available mental health services because of COVID-19 effects on the health care system

There were also many ideas for how psychologists can contribute directly to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Inform and advise governments and others on the content, and the form of public messages, to ensure that they are credible, consistent, and action oriented. For example, psychology needs to make the point that current language about social distancing is not helpful. The rhetoric should move away from “social distancing” to “physical distancing” for safety and “increased connectedness” for wellbeing.
• Advise policy makers on the likely impact of restrictive policies and how to encourage public compliance with necessary measures
• Advise policy and programs on strategies for strengthening of mental health services

Together the speakers offered some immediate next steps:

• Become familiar with global advice on the pandemic: UN-related guidance: WHO guidelines on Mental Health during tines of COVID, IASC guidelines, policy briefs from the UN Secretary-General, and use these documents as the basis for advocacy and program development (see links below)
• Increase psychology’s voice in the media – especially through individual stories
• Join hands with other professionals (psychiatry, public health, social work, nursing) to create a larger impact in policy and messaging.
• Join the “Countdown to 2020: in an initiative “United for Global Mental Health”: https://www.unitedgmh.org/countdown-to-2030

References

WHO Global mental health action plan: https://www.who.int/mental_health/action_plan_2013/en/
WHO: Mental Health and Psychosocial Considerations during the COVID-19 Outbreak – interim guidance: https://www.who.int/publications-detail/WHO-2019-nCoV-MentalHealth-2020.1
UN Policy Brief
https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un_policy_brief-covid_and_mental_health_final.pdf

Tribute to Jean Lau Chin, ICP President 2017-2018

By Natalie Porter, ICP Past President

Two years ago, when Jean was ICP President and on a Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship in Australia, I received an urgent email from her asking for my help. She needed gift cards sent to her immediately. This request was early on in what we know now to be a common scam, and I almost fell for it. I knew she was traveling at the time and giving a talk outside of her home base of Sydney. I thought, “perhaps she forgot to bring something as thank you gifts for her hosts or assistants, and being the gracious person she is, she’d want to make that right.” The closeness of our relationship made her request to me feasible, although I did wonder why she wasn’t sending out Gene, her husband, to get what she needed. I was in New Orleans at the time and emailed questions back and forth as I tried to figure out how to implement her request. As I did so, she became increasingly insistent and her tone demanding. I remember thinking “geez, Jean, I’m trying the best I can.” And then came the aha moment, “This is a scam!” Why? Because in 30 years of friendship with Jean, I had never heard her take a tone that was angry, demanding, insistent, or impatient.

Jean was persistent, courageous, clear about her ideas and determined, but she was never demanding or insistent in the ways she implemented her ideas. She walked the talk, not only in dedicating her life to transformation around social justice and diversity, but in her leadership and relational style. She led through inclusion, warmly engaging others, involving them in her projects, mentoring countless numbers of colleagues, young professionals, and students. She practiced cultural and personal humility in the ways that she related to all of us. Jean knew where she was going; her map to a future where diversity and inclusion were truly integrated into a global psychology and societal change was drawn out in detail. She encouraged us to take this path with her, offered us ideas, opportunity, mentoring, respect, and camaraderie and valued everyone’s contributions as much as her own.

Jean’s contributions to international psychology across the health, mental health, education, leadership, and diversity domains were monumental. She was a pioneer in expanding the understanding of the intersection of gender, ethnicity and race to include immigration, cross-cultural, and international perspectives. Throughout her prodigious scholarship, the focus on international psychology is ubiquitous throughout her 15+ authored and edited books, 25+ journal articles and 20+ book chapters. Her contributions to Chinese and Chinese American psychology have expanded the knowledge base of psychology. Her advocacy embedded this knowledge into the fabric of health policy at the state and national levels. Jean’s focus on immigration and its impact on psychological identity, health, mental health, social and health disparities, and social equity factors within U.S. society constituted a core of her scholarship.  Her scholarship addressing discrimination and social justice, both domestically and globally, constituted a third area of scholarship. Her legacy of articles and edited volumes are unrivaled in the U.S. for their breadth and thoroughness and for the integration of international perspectives.

Jean’s research and scholarship on the field of leadership from a gendered, multicultural, and international perspective represents some of the most innovative and important work in the field. It conceptualizes leadership from multiple standpoints that highlight how culture and context shape the development of leaders, their practices, values, and perspectives on successful leadership outcomes. This work, conducted both within diverse populations in the U.S. and on international populations, has profoundly expanded how we think about leadership and the shift to multiple origins, multiple forms, and multiple outcomes that is crucial for leaders in an increasingly global society. In Jean’s special way, she created a large network of research collaborators across the world for this leadership project. The ICP leadership interest area is an outgrowth of this network. Jean was awarded the title Senior Fulbright Specialist and consulted around leadership in Hong Kong. A few years later she went to Sydney as a Distinguished Fulbright Fellow, studying leadership among aboriginal groups as well as among other diverse Australian cultures.

Jean shaped psychology education within the U.S. to be more inclusive of international psychology, to promote the international exchanges of scholars, and to develop and shape programs outside of the U.S. Within the U.S., she has expanded the curricular offerings pertaining to cross-cultural and international psychology. She led university interdisciplinary initiatives on diversity that raised the awareness of students, faculty, and administrators and led to implementation of programs and practices that promote international knowledge, scholarship, and professional exchanges. While the Dean of the California School of Professional Psychology/Alliant, Dr. Chin founded a PsyD program offered in Hong Kong that received accreditation through the U.S. western regional accreditor of higher education (WASC) and grew two other programs, in Mexico City and Tokyo respectively, from relatively new to flourishing graduate programs. She made sure these programs reflected the cultural values, practices, and research of the countries in which they resided.

Jean has long been recognized has an expert in health and mental health service delivery pertaining to the needs of Asian Americans. She served as the Executive Director of a community health organization for Asian populations for a decade. It developed innovative and relevant services for international and immigrant populations in Boston that then influenced service delivery for these groups throughout the U.S. through Jean’s consultations and advocacy within the USDHHS Office of Minority Health, NIMH, the CDC, and SAMHSA. Her extensive contributions through several boards and committees within these branches of government included both increasing the knowledge-base and competencies of U.S. providers to meet the needs of international populations and improving the mechanisms for outreach and service delivery to reduce the health and mental health disparities of these groups.

Jean’s commitments to international service within psychology have been remarkable. She served on CIRP, where she worked on the development of the international leadership network and the integration of U.S. multicultural with international psychology. In addition to ICP, Jean was President of APA Divisions 35, 45, and 52. In all groups she increased awareness and initiatives that furthered theory and application of international perspectives of psychology. For her service to the field, Dr. Chin has received many, many awards; three particularly relevant to international psychology are the Distinguished Contribution Award of the Asian American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Elder Award, National Multicultural Conference and Summit, and the Presidential Citation, American Psychological Association as well as the Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship.

Jean made her mark not only through her scholarship and advocacy but on the hearts and minds of sister and fellow travelers seeking social equity and social justice. She never raised her voice but taught us all to listen. She was a powerful voice for change and gave voice to innumerable others. Jean was truly a psychologist of the world.

Tribute to Jean Chin

By Josephine Tan, ICP President-Elect

Dr. Jean Lau Chin was an extraordinary researcher, writer, academic, and leader.  She was also a much-loved colleague and friend to many who know her.  Since her passing on May 13, 2020, many have written tributes to share what they remember and cherish about her, and more are still coming in.   Collectively, all these messages reveal the multi-faceted sides to Jean, and bear evidence to her incredible accomplishments and the positive influence she had on many people.

I had the privilege of working with Jean on the Board of the International Council of Psychologists (ICP), and on her global and diverse leadership program of research.  The project was designed to examine alternate models of leadership that diverge from the stereotyped notion of a white male leader, and of leadership as a vertical top-down process.  She was interested in the intersectionality of gender and culture in our understanding of leadership, and had a special interest in women leaders and Indigenous leaders.  She strongly felt that leaders can be found in all segments of the population – irrespective of gender and ethnicity – and that lived experiences and social identities of peoples guide their leadership style and the way they interact with those they lead.  She set up the ICP special interest Global and Diverse Leadership (GDL) group which consisted of many researchers from the United States and across the world.  Under her leadership, the group worked in unison collecting interview and quantitative data from different countries.  The findings would be written for an edited book that would offer new leadership paradigms informed by the intersection of gender and culture.

Jean’s interest in leadership was not confined solely to the management sector or to academic questions.  With the rising of authoritarianism and nationalistic leadership in different parts of the world, Jean and I became interested in the reasons for the change in political leadership style throughout the word.   We noted that countries were becoming more restrictive with their borders and expressing more xenophobic sentiments, and were concerned about the erosion of democracy and individual liberties.  Yet, we believed that the changes were not taking place in a vacuum, and that there were reasons for why people seem to be supporting more nationalistic leaders.  Together with Amina Muazzam from Pakistan and Élison Santos from Brazil, we developed a research project to look at the role that age, gender, and ethnicity play in determining peoples’ preferences for different leadership styles and how those preferences might be shaped by the individuals’ social identities and lived experiences.

When the Covid-19 became a global pandemic, anger against China was channelled into threats and actual acts of violence towards individuals of Chinese descent living outside of China.  No distinction was made as to whether the targets were born in those other countries, naturalized citizens or visitors.  In some cases, the anger was also expressed towards other minorities who looked like Chinese but were in fact from a different ethnic group.  Jean understood the anger but worried that when national leaders engage in inflammatory remarks that reinforce division and resentment between groups, the country would suffer through in-fighting when the more urgent crisis was the coronavirus and about saving lives.  She presented her views in an APA leadership blog calling for national leaders to not engage in behaviours that would encourage violence; the feedback she received was that she was pro-China.  I had the opportunity to discuss with her the feedback.  She stated that she was not expressing pro-China political views but rather, she was addressing the responsibility of leaders to heal and not divide through their words and actions.  She felt that she needed to clarify her points in her blog to avoid misunderstanding.  Unfortunately, before she could do that, she was admitted to the hospital where she passed away.

Jean was passionate about her research, and was very generous in sharing her knowledge and expertise.  She was very inclusive and accessible to others, which made her a natural mentor to both early career and experienced psychologists.  She readily shared her ideas and listened with great interest what others had to say, and treated everyone as equals.  She was open to opposing views.  She had a gift for keeping her head about her even in uncomfortable situations with heightened negative emotions.  She listened, tried to identify the problems and source of difficulties, and kept her focus on balance and solutions.  Jean and I had on several occasions discussed the concept of “glass cliff” where women leaders are brought in to handle situations where there is a crisis with a high likelihood of failure.  She had been in such situations and came through successfully because of her leadership skills.

Last year, I helped out in Jean’s campaign for APA President.  Although she did not win, she had several endorsements and many individuals came up to personally express their support for her.  She received the election outcome with grace, and said that she would still be able to make contributions to psychology and society in many other ways, and she was right.  She continued to work on her research, her publications, teaching, student mentoring, professional service and much more.  Oftentimes, it was hard to fathom how she was able to make headway with so many projects on the go, and when she would find time to rest.  I would joke with her that perhaps she had clones of herself running around.

Jean was more than a psychology colleague to me; she was also a friend and a mentor.  Our shared cultural heritage meant that I had an easier time explaining myself because of nuances in our cultural psyche that is sometimes difficult to express but that will influence decision-making and reactions to specific situations.  When I volunteered to help out on Jean’s APA presidential campaign, I told her that I could assist by sharing her campaign messages with others at the APA convention in Chicago.  She looked at me and nodded, and said “well, it is difficult for Asian women, you know”.  I knew exactly what she meant by that because that was precisely the reason why I offered to help.  What Jean meant is that many Asian women leaders find it difficult to promote themselves.  So, they focus on their campaign message about how things can change for the better, but even so, it is usually not delivered in an emphatic manner that would drive the message home.

In Jean I saw an Asian woman who had accomplished so much and yet never forgot her roots.  She retained her humility, made many friends, was ever helpful and accessible, and never turned people away.  She was never too important for anyone even though she had mingled with top politicians and world-renowned individuals.  She had a high sense of duty and responsibility to society and to the promotion of social justice.  She did not shy away from difficult topics and situations even though she knew there might be backlash – such was her courage, the strength of her character and moral convictions that everyone had equal rights and equal access to opportunities, even as diversity was to be understood and accepted.  She was a role model and an inspiration to many.  Hers was a life very well lived!

When we lost Jean, we lost an exceptional leader and an exceptional human being.  Yet, she remains with us in her work and our memory of her.  The GDL group is extremely shocked and saddened by her passing; some of us are still processing what happened.  Even so, we will continue her work and honor her.  Our plan is to complete the research and the book in collaboration with Joseph Trimble who is the co-editor.

Jean remains in our lives when we talk about her, laugh when we recall the good times, and when our actions serve to change the world for the better.   I take comfort in the thought that she is in a good place together with her husband, Gene, who also contracted Covid-19 and passed away several days before she did.  Gene was an accomplished and well-liked individual in his own right.  He travelled with Jean and many of us came to know him well.  He was an exceptional photographer and I would tell him that if he were to ever put on a gallery exhibition, I would be there.  The last time my partner, Michael Wesner, and I saw Jean and Gene, we were having fun in Manhattan Chinatown in in November 2019.  Gene gave us a gift –a photo that he had taken and framed himself of a metal sculpture outside the convention centre in San Diego.

With his keen eye, he could perceive the splitting of the morning light into different fantastic colours on the metal and he quickly captured the moment with his camera before it was gone.  The beautiful photo now sits in a quiet peaceful place in our home, and whenever we look at it, we fondly remember Jean and Gene.

ICP Student Report

ICP is a fabulous platform for students across the globe to connect with each other as well as gain invaluable professional support from psychologists and those from related professions. Annual ICP conferences and its affiliate conferences provide opportunity to students to showcase their research to a global audience as well as to learn from cutting-edge research and other endeavors to address various local and global challenges, especially in the fields of human rights, dignity, and justice. Currently we have over 30 student members from several countries.

Students have also opportunities to participate as ICP interns at the United Nations, in addition to volunteer in several committees and activities of the ICP. Finally, there are several research-related grants available to students through ICP, such as ICP travel grant and ICP student poster award.