By John W. Hall, PhD, ABPP
ASCH President
This is my farewell column as President of ASCH.
Incoming President Phil Colosimo and President-Elect Jeff Feldman bring tremendous experience and exciting new ideas to invigorate ASCH and its offerings in the coming year. They will be supported by a board fully staffed with new leadership in Division Chairs, Executive, and At-Large Members. Working together with our Kellen staff counterparts, we are hopeful that the coming year will bring growth in membership and reach across the healing professions. I know I am preaching to the choir, but I genuinely believe that a health care environment that is more informed by clinical hypnosis promises better outcomes for patients and providers alike.
The 2025 ASMW overseen by Dr. Colosimo will bring a powerful mix of new voices and recognized masters to first-time and returning participants. As someone who has recently had the job of putting together the conference, I’d challenge each of you who has a good idea or promising practice related to clinical hypnosis to consider submitting an abstract for next year’s conference. If you’re worried about your ability to put it together yourself, reach out to some of the presenters you’ve seen in your interest area. In my experience, they can be enormously gracious in either mentoring or offering to co-present with you. For instance, this year besides my usual interest area of high-impact chronic pain, I was delighted to find a new book in one of my other major interest areas—using hypnosis with our LGBTQ+ clients— and sought out the author Christian Skoorsmith to co-present. You’ll have to let us know how we did after the ASMW, but each of us can play a role in making sure that clinical hypnosis in general and ASCH in particular are speaking to our interests. Are there topics you’re wanting to learn more about or voices from whom you want to hear more? Reach out to Jeff as he starts planning next year’s ASMW (much sooner than you might think).
One of the most profound transitions during my tenure has been the retirement of Stephen Lankton after 20 years as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis and finding a remarkable successor, well known both as an AJCH Science Editor and as an educator and colleague, David Reid. The transformation the Journal has undergone during Steve’s leadership has been truly remarkable, and based on Steve’s recommendation and the Board’s vetting, we are delighted to see how far we’ll come under David’s guidance. I don’t think I’m getting too far ahead of David in suggesting that we’d love for you to consider submitting articles as well. Although I probably sound remarkably anachronistic in these times, I believe, and I think the Board believes, that the community of practitioners of clinical hypnosis is made stronger by its diversity and that part of our work is to seek out the faces we don’t see and help build their capacity to enrich us with their work.
In summary, I guess that’s the one thing I hope you carry away from your participation in ASCH this year—that clinical hypnosis as a field and ASCH as an organization are both strengthened by you being at the table and we’d love to help you discover just how much you have to bring.
See you as the ASMW!
