Networking, Mentorship, and the APA Annual Meeting, With Frank Clark, MD

Frank Clark, MD, offered a reflection on the value of attending psychiatric professional conferences, with the upcoming American Psychiatric Association annual meeting for 2026.

Clark argued that conference attendance should be approached with intentionality, specifically around collaboration and creativity. He observed that clinicians frequently operate in institutional silos and miss opportunities to build cross-institutional partnerships, noting that a conference encounter can initiate collaborations that would otherwise never occur. He illustrated this with a personal example: a connection made at a prior APA annual meeting in San Francisco through the conference app led to an ongoing collegial relationship with a psychiatric nurse practitioner from Canada, noting it was a relationship he "would have never made if [he] hadn't gone to the meeting."

Clark acknowledged that the scale of the APA annual meeting can feel overwhelming, particularly for first-time attendees, and encouraged clinicians to resist that apprehension by stepping outside their comfort zones, selectively attending sessions of personal relevance, and proactively introducing themselves to colleagues. He specifically addressed early-career psychiatrists, who he sees often hesitate to approach senior figures or luminaries in the field out of fear of being dismissed. Clark countered that concern directly, stating that "these are people, these are human beings" and that "the mentee-mentorship dyad is a beautiful relationship that needs to be fostered."^1,2

Clark closed by encouraging psychiatrists at all career stages to attend meetings for the dual purpose of knowledge acquisition and relationship building, underscoring that meaningful professional connections and mentorship opportunities are among the most durable benefits of in-person conference participation.

Dr Clark is an outpatient psychiatrist at Prisma Health-Upstate and clinical associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Greenville. He served on the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force to Address Structural Racism Throughout Psychiatry, and he currently serves as the Diversity and Inclusion section editor and advisory board member for Psychiatric Times.

References

1. Vaziri-Harami R, Khademi M, Shamsi A, et al. Mentorship in psychiatry: a brief report of designing and implementing a program for residents at university of medical sciences. J Educ Health Promot. 2025;14:310.

2. Sim LA, Vickers KS, Croarkin PE, et al. The relationship of mentorship to career outcomes in academic psychiatry and psychology: a needs assessment. Acad Psychiatry. 2023;47(5):521-525.