Dr. Altha Jeanne Stewart is the Senior Associate Dean for Community Health Engagement, and Director of the Center for Youth Advocacy and Well-Being, and Director of the Division of Public and Community Psychiatry at University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC). In her role as Senior Associate Dean for Community Health Engagement, she serves as PI/co-PI overseeing grants funded by HHS (SAMHSA, NIH, CDC and OMH), DOJ (OJJDP), Robert Wood Johnson and Annie E. Casey Foundations, local philanthropy, and the state of Tennessee totaling over $10 million in annual funding. She is also responsible for developing services related to outreach efforts in critical health areas facing the local community, including primary care and mental health service access, integrated health/behavioral health, chronic medical conditions (diabetes, hypertension and cancer), and COVID-19 identified health disparities. As a native Memphian and longstanding leader in Community Engagement, she has established working relationships with community organizations serving children and families, and strong ties with community health, behavioral health, and social and human service providers across the county to assist with referrals for needed services. She is President of the American Association for Community Psychiatry and a past President of the American Psychiatric Association, Association of Women Psychiatrists, the Black Psychiatrists of America and the American Psychiatric Foundation. Through these positions and others, she has long taken a leading national role on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in medicine and how discrimination and other social determinants affect a community’s health and wellbeing. At UTHSC she currently leads research initiatives to identify and address issues related to lack of knowledge and awareness about access to treatment for behavioral health and chronic medical conditions in persistent poverty populations and long-standing systemic health inequities which contribute to the poor health outcomes in these groups. She has co-edited two volumes of Psychiatric Clinics of North America: Workforce and Diversity in Psychiatry (2022) and Achieving Mental Health Equity (2020), as well as the book, Black Mental Health: Patients, Providers and Systems (2018). She co-authored a chapter in the 2022 edition of Textbook of Community Psychiatry titled “The Role of the Psychiatrist in Community Consultation and Collaboration”.

Host:

Angela Liu, MD is a third-year psychiatry resident and Chair of the APA Public Psychiatry Fellowship.

Editor:

Zoe Wyse is a third-year medical student

Created by the American Association for Community Psychiatry (AACP).

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