As we enter a new academic year, our trainees and our professional communities are grappling with historic challenges. Our students, residents, and fellows have been confronted by reports of police brutality, including the murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor. These events have led to heightened awareness of the destructiveness of racism, both through its most violent and overt manifestations and the insidious ways that it leads to health care inequities and rarely acknowledged microaggressions in educational and clinical programs. The four sponsoring organizations of the journal Academic Psychiatry—American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry, American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training, Association for Academic Psychiatry, and Association of Directors of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry—have spoken with a united voice by issuing a Joint Statement on Systemic Racism, located in the front pages of the August 2020 print issue and online [1], which calls for specific and urgent action. Calhoun [2] makes a similar call in The Learner’s Voice in this issue, where the author eloquently, passionately, and persuasively challenges us to integrate advocacy and activism into our professional identity and to place social justice at the heart of our mission as academic psychiatrists. Our journal leadership takes these calls to heart, and we will be committing ourselves toward these goals.

The pandemic of racism is a chronic affliction that has long burdened our trainees, staff, faculty, and patients who are minorities. Added to this, our trainees also face the new stress of training during the COVID-19 pandemic. Clearly, the need to understand the nature of our trainees’ stressors, how they are affected individually, and how to best help them cope has never been more urgent. The August 2020 issue of Academic Psychiatry brings together several papers that increase our understanding of burnout, well-being, and resilience in medical students and residents. The papers by Steiner-Hofbauer and Holzinger [3], Lee et al. [4], Shoua-Desmarais et al. [5], and Donohoe et al. [6] contribute to our appreciation of the importance of adaptive coping strategies and healthy defenses in sustaining resilience in the face of stress. Our literary resources column [7] highlights two new books, Combating physician burnout: a guide for psychiatrists [8] and Professional well-being: enhancing wellness among psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health clinicians [9], which together present a rich, multilayered review of the individual, environmental, and systemic factors that determine whether we find meaning and connection in our work, or demoralization and exhaustion.

As a field academic psychiatry continues to face workforce shortages in the number of available psychiatrists, at a time when we can expect that the above-mentioned stresses will increase the burden of mental illness and psychiatric distress. One response of health care systems has been to alleviate this shortage through adding physician assistants and nurse practitioners. As these relatively new categories of providers enter our clinical systems, it is vital that academic psychiatrists provide leadership in creating standards of education, training, and practice. In this issue, Novoa et al. [10] describe an innovative fellowship program for physician assistants, and Morreale et al. [11] review the challenges and opportunities generated by the entry of non-physician providers into academic mental health systems.

We hope that you find the August issue of Academic Psychiatry interesting and inspiring as you begin the new academic year. Please feel free to contact us with any feedback. The journal also has two open calls for papers (Table 1): “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and “COVID-19 and Psychiatry Education.” We hope you will consider Academic Psychiatry as a place of publication for your work.

Table 1 Academic Psychiatry calls for papers. All papers undergo a review and future publication is not guaranteed. See the journal’s instructions for authors for more details [12]
Full size table