Update on MHS section petition

Our petition to establish Mental Health Statistics (MHS) as a new ASA Section has made important progress since our previous update on January 31, 2012.

Our petition was submitted to the ASA Council of Sections Governing Board (COSGB) on November 10, 2011, followed with supplemental submissions of additional petitions on January 27 and May 24, 2012, with a total of 140 ASA members participating in this petition.

The COSGB reviewed our petition on January 28, 2012, and “voted to move forward with the proposed section on Mental Health Statistics,”  with some suggestions for minor tweaking to our proposed Section Charter.  We worked with Dr. Bonnie Ghosh-Dastidar and Mr. Rick Peterson from the ASA Council of Sections Governing Board to incorporate these suggestions, and submitted the revised charter and preamble to the MHS/SMHR members for review on April 29, 2012.  The ten-day review period came to a closure on May 8, 2012, and no revisions were proposed.  Therefore, the updated version of our proposed section charter and preamble, shown in the links given below,

MHS Charter 2012-04-30 Preamble

MHS Charter 2012-04-30 Charter

were submitted on May 11, 2012 to the ASA Council of Sections as the final version for these documents, as part of the supporting material for our petition.

The composition of our proposed Executive Committee and Section Officers, and their contact info, are available online at the link below:

MHS Executive Committee and Officers.

We were invited to attend the ASA Council Sections meeting at the JSM on July 29, 2012, to give a presentation on our petition.  Robert Gibbons, Naihua Duan, and Patrick Shrout attended this meeting on behalf of MHS, and answered questions from the Council of Sections regarding our petition.  We have attached below their presentation for your information:

Mental Health Statistics 2012-07-29 COS RG-ND-PS.ppt

The next step of the review process is for the Sections to review our petition, then the Section Representatives to  the Council of Sections will vote on the merits of our petition during the month of September 2o12.  We will probably find out whether our petition is approved in early October 2012.  If our petition is approved, the establishment of MHS as a new ASA Section will become effective in January 2013.