Community Psychology and Psychological Distress

Abstract

Dominant approaches to support people in psychological distress are individualistic, emphasizing intervention conducted in the privacy of the therapy room, focused on exploring and resolving intrapsychic problems. This approach, originating with Freud, now has a wide variety of permutations, including self-psychology, cognitive models, and those inspired by Buddhism, dialectics, somatics, and more. This personal approach to mental distress, however, is limited, given that it fails to recognize the wider social, political, and cultural determinants of such distress and cuts the person off from their community, where solidarity, solace, and healing might also take place. The aim of this chapter is to introduce the reader to community psychology, as employed for the amelioration of psychological concerns. In particular, it serves as a primer for the content that might be included in teaching this subject to future activist-practitioners, with particular attention to the critical pedagogy involved. A case study will also be provided, outlining how a clinical psychology program was modified to include a community psychology curriculum. The development of activist-scholars focused on community psychology will also be discussed, with reference to a series of studies currently in progress.KeywordsCommunityMental healthPedagogyLived experience