President’s Message

President’s Message

By Regine Galanti, PhD

First, I’m so excited to serve as your SCCAP president. I’ll do my best to lead this organization in a way that helps the field and its members.  I’d also like to express gratitude to my friend and colleague, Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, for all her hard work and dedication to SCCAP as the 2024 president. I’m excited to continue to work with her in her capacity as past president.

Let me introduce myself. I became involved in SCCAP around six years ago when I was appointed to the board as Communications Chair. It was a natural fit – I have a strong interest in dissemination. My clinical interests are anxiety and OCD, and there just aren’t enough evidence based child psychologists to go around. Dissemination for me means finding novel ways to talk to the public about treatment. Personally, this involves being on social media to talk about evidence based principles, and writing self-help books for children, teens, and parents about anxiety.

When I started volunteering for SCCAP, I loved the idea of being able to find interesting and new ways to communicate about what SCCAP was doing to its membership and to the public. I’m probably preaching to the choir, but SCCAP does a lot! We have two fantastic journals the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (JCCAP), and Evidence Based Practice of Child and Adolescent Mental Health (EPCAMH), and even before I was a member of SCCAP, the evidence based updates in JCCAP were mainstays in staying updated in my clinical practice. I was and am a frequent user of our public facing dissemination website, Effective Child Therapy (www.effectivechildtherapy.org), and have sent it to countless patients and even listed it as a resource in my books. Since becoming involved I now know SCCAP does so much more – from the awards we offer, to our webinar series, to our upcoming inaugural conference in June 2025.

I noticed, though, that my professional hat is a bit different from many of the other board members. I’m the founder and director of a private practice in New York, while most of the SCCAP board (as is the case of many psychological organizations) are made up of fantastic psychologists in academia and university medical centers. We know that practitioners make up a large part of our membership base, but those members are underrepresented at the level of service and leadership.  Let’s talk about how – and why – I think you should get involved.

When I started my practice, I was worried about drifting from evidence based practice. I was convinced that the only way I could practice the way I wanted was to have peer supervision from colleagues who knew as much about child CBT as I did, and my network just didn’t support that goal. I sat down with a mentor, who pointed out that there was more than one way to anchor yourself. In the decade since, I’ve realized that for me, the combination of conference attendance, reading, and service has kept me grounded. Conference attendance and keeping up on the literature makes sense, but I’ve been surprised at how much service in the field has given me both professionally and personally. By volunteering for the organizations I value, I’ve met some fantastic people who have become my friends, vastly expanded my professional network, and created the peer supervision base that I was looking for initially.  As an added benefit, I’ve been able to add my voice and shape the direction of organizations like SCCAP.

So my call to action is to get involved. It would be amazing for SCCAP to have you, and you might be surprised by what you get back from volunteering. I’m speaking to all of you: students, practitioners, researchers, mid-career, all of you. Representing clinical child and adolescent psychology is a huge job, but in order to do so, we need to understand our membership, and what better way to do that than by providing your voice?

Finally, I’d also love to hear from you! Tell me about what SCCAP is doing right, and what you think we can do better. Please be in touch – rgalanti@longislandbehavioral.com. I’m hoping we can all work together to  improve the mental health and resilience of children, adolescents, and families.