Report on the Division 12 Board Meeting, January 1996
-Excerpt-

   Dianne L. Chambless
    
   The Division 12 board met on January 12 and 14, 1996. Particular
   issues of interest to SSCP members were the following:
   
   1. Lynn Rehm, an SSCP member, attended his first meeting in his
   capacity as President-Elect. Rehm indicated that, as his presidential
   initiative, he will appoint a task force to develop recommendations
   concerning methods of meaningful continuing education in empirically
   validated treatments. This initiative has great promise for extending
   the work of the SSCP-sponsored Task Force for Promotion and
   Dissemination of Psychological Procedures.
   
   Rehm has appointed Clinical Science editor Paul Rokke as Division 12
   APA Program Chair and Nadine Kaslow as Postdoctoral Institutes Chair.
   Both are SSCP members.
   
   2. Nate Perry, current Division 12 President and SSCP member,
   announced that his presidential initiative will be the formation of a
   group to develop guidelines for an area of clinical psychology
   practice for which there is solid and plentiful empirical support.
   This effort would serve as a test case for the use of the APA Template
   for Developing Guidelines: Interventions for Mental Disorders and
   Psychosocial Aspects of Physical Disorders. The Template was developed
   under the leadership of SSCP members David Barlow and Sue Mineka,
   among others. Perry welcomes suggestions for a treatment to select as
   the test case.
   
   3. The Task Force on Psychological Interventions, the successor to the
   Task Force for Promotion and Dissemination of Psychological Procedures
   will continue for another year under Perry's presidency. Dianne
   Chambless will continue to chair the task force. Chambless presented
   the 1995 report of the task force to the board for discussion. This
   report contains an updated list of examples of empirically supported
   treatments the task force has identified and will be submitted to The
   Clinical Psychologist.
   
   Although support in the Division 12 leadership for this task force
   continues to be strong, the initial report is controversial with some
   other APA constituencies, in particular Division 42 (Independent
   Practice), or at least its president, Arthur Kovacs. Kovacs argues
   that the task force's examples of empirically validated treatments
   will be misconstrued as practice guidelines and used against
   psychologists not practicing these treatments by third party payers.
   To quell this controversy, the Division 12 agreed to issue a statement
   indicating that the task force's reports are neither guidelines nor
   official Division 12 or APA policy. For this same reason, the 1995 and
   future reports will be published by the members of the task force as
   individuals rather than as a task force.