Poverty, ACEs and stigmatised places: The application of psychology to the challenges of disadvantage.

Abstract

Our life circumstances present continual challenges to our mental health and well-being. For most of us, the politics of economy and society determine our prospects of living a good life. The fact that the ability to control and change things that happen to us is largely vested in the power of remote others has inevitable, mostly negative consequences. The following opinion piece illustrates the challenge our discipline faces in locating a complimentary contribution alongside those of public health, sociology and other sister disciplines with particular reference to the intractable concerns of poverty, ACES and stigmatised places. The piece presents an examination of what psychology as a discipline can do in the context of adversity and challenges that individuals face but over which they have little sense of control. The discipline of psychology needs to play a meaningful part in understanding and addressing the impacts of societal matters, moving from a dominant position of individualised understandings of distress to embrace more fully the context in which people are expected to feel good and function well. Community psychology offers a useful, established philosophy from which to advance our practices. However, a more sophisticated, discipline-wide narrative and grounded understanding that empathically represents real lives and captures individual functioning within a complex and distant societal system is urgently required.