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I, Clif Tennison, MD, serve as Chief Clinical Officer at the Helen Ross McNabb Center, a mental health and social services agency in Knoxville, TN, with a proud 50-year tradition. I came to McNabb in 1983, after finishing a Psychiatric Residency in Chapel Hill, NC, where both of my sons were born. I was born in West Texas, and did undergraduate (1967-71) and postgraduate (1971-73) work in Religion at Baylor University and Premedical Sciences (1973-74) at the University of Texas at Arlington. A number of early clinical experiences in psychiatry during medical school at Tulane (1975-1979) influenced my career choice and introduced me to some of the best food in the world. The University of North Carolina offered comprehensive training, including both clinical and administrative experience in community psychiatry. My family and I enjoy the mountains, rivers and forests of East Tennessee and try to remain loyal Tar Heel fans in Vol country. Since 1994, the single most important goal has been to survive the experiment in public sector managed care called "TennCare." The challenge to serve seriously ill adults and children, and to somehow avoid burning out, in the face of unprecedented cuts in funding, services, and staff continues to be daunting. As a founding member, board member and former President of the AACP, I have found practical solutions, personal support, and professional purpose in this group of idealists and friends. |
My professional interests are still centered in community psychiatry. Enormous satisfaction comes from working in the areas of program planning and evaluation, medical direction and training of clinical staff, direct work with SPMI adults and SED children and adolescents, jail and forensic work, interagency collaboration, and community education and advocacy. Major issues for community psychiatrists as a national group must include the unparalleled losses in community outreach, assertive treatment, alternatives to hospitalization, access to psychotherapies, and prescribing autonomy that have resulted from underfunded and poorly run public sector managed care schemes. While the AACP continues to strive for adequacy, and even excellence, in prevention, multidisciplinary work, case management, dual diagnosis efforts, and psychiatry in alternative settings (schools, jails, nursing homes, shelters), I encourage all community psychiatrists to attend to the very real threats to community mental health practice itself -- the epidemic of blind cost cutting -- newly stigmatizing the mentally ill and wrenching us back to the reason for the creation of the AACP in 1984: excessive psychiatric responsibility without commensurate authority. |
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