Building a New Community Psychology of Mental Health

Building a New Community Psychology of Mental Health
Author: Carl Walker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2017-03-31
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1137360992

This book provides a much-needed account of informal community-based approaches to working with mental distress. It starts from the premise that contemporary mainstream psychiatry and psychology struggle to capture how distress results from complex embodied arrays of social experiences that are embedded within specific historical, cultural, political and economic settings. The authors challenge mainstream understandings of mental health that position a naive public in need of mental health literacy. Instead it is clear that a considerable amount of invaluable mental distress work is undertaken in spaces in our communities that are not understood as mental health treatments. This book represents one of the first attempts to position these kinds of spaces at the center of how we understand and address problems of mental distress and suffering. The chapters draw on case studies from the UK and abroad to point toward an exciting new paradigm based on informal community and socially oriented approaches to mental health. Written in an unusually accessible and engaging style, this book will appeal to social science students, academics, practitioners and policy makers interested in community and social approaches to mental health.

Community Psychology and Community Mental Health

Community Psychology and Community Mental Health
Author: Geoffrey Nelson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2014-08-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0199362432

Mental health practices and programs around the world face growing criticism from policymakers, consumers, and service providers for being ineffective, overly reliant on treatment by professionals, and overly focused on symptoms. Many have called for new paradigms of mental health and new practices that can better support recovery, community integration, and adaptive functioning for persons diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities. While there has recently been much discourse about transformation and recovery, there has yet to be a critical and systematic review that unpacks the concept of mental health systems transformation or that examines strategies for how to create transformative change in mental health. Community Psychology and Community Mental Health provides empirical justification and a conceptual foundation for transformative change in mental health, based on community psychology values and principles of ecology, collaboration, empowerment, and social justice. Chapters provide strategies for making changes at the level of society, policy, organizations, community settings, and mental health practices. The editors and authors draw from experience in different countries in recognition of the need to tailor change strategies to different contexts. The common experiences of the international perspectives represented underscore the importance and the need for a new paradigm while demonstrating that there are many alternatives and opportunities for pursuing transformative change. This book will be of interest to community mental health professionals, researchers, and students, as well as policymakers, administrators, and those with lived experience of mental health issues.

Community Psychology

Community Psychology
Author: John Moritsugu
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2015-07-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317349938

Community Psychology, 5/e focuses on the prevention of problems, the promotion of well-being, empowerment of members within a community, the appreciation of diversity, and an ecological model for the understanding of human behavior. Attention is paid to both “classic” early writings and the most recent journal articles and reviews by today’s practitioners and researchers. Historical and alternative methods of effecting social change are explored in this book, with the overall theme that the environment is as important as the individual in it. This text is available in a variety of formats – digital and print. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Understand the historical and contemporary principles of community psychology. Apply theory and research to social services, mental health, health, legal, and public health systems

Community Psychology in Practice

Community Psychology in Practice
Author: James G. Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317993624

Community Psychology in Practice: An Oral History Through the Stories of Five Community Psychologists is a unique examination of how community psychology evolved through the years. Five highly respected community psychologists recount their personal histories telling how they went from academia to careers disseminating principles of community psychology. Newer members to the field of psychology can trace how these leaders came to pursue careers in community psychology. As these respected experts tell their own stories in accessible narrative form, the reader gains a clear understanding of how applied community psychology intertwines with history, context, social movements, and individual personalities is revealed. Each career story in Community Psychology in Practice: An Oral History Through the Stories of Five Community Psychologists illustrates how societal events such as wars, economic depressions, the civil rights movement, and discrimination shaped personal philosophies and ultimately lead to their decision to become applied community psychologists and practitioners. Each contributor was asked to discuss their stories from four experiential dimensions: personal, contextual, intellectual, and ideological. The various viewpoints reveal how each one’s ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and academic background affected how they experienced the history of community psychology. Three eminent scholars from the fields of community psychology, history, and business psychology discuss the narratives to provide further insight. The narrative studies in Community Psychology in Practice: An Oral History Through the Stories of Five Community Psychologists include: Anne Mulvey John Morgan Irma Serrano-Garcia Tom Wolff Carolyn Swift. Community Psychology in Practice: An Oral History Through the Stories of Five Community Psychologists is an encouraging, stimulating look at community psychology that is valuable to community psychologists, historians of psychology, researchers, industrial organization (IO) psychologists, educators, and students.

International Community Psychology

International Community Psychology
Author: Stephanie Reich
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2007-07-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0387495002

This is the first in-depth guide to global community psychology research and practice, history and development, theories and innovations, presented in one field-defining volume. This book will serve to promote international collaboration, enhance theory utilization and development, identify biases and barriers in the field, accrue critical mass for a discipline that is often marginalized, and to minimize the pervasive US-centric view of the field.

Community Psychology and the Schools

Community Psychology and the Schools
Author: George J. Allen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2017-09-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351977563

Originally published in 1976, this volume begins with a theoretical overview of the major trends in the community psychology movement at the time, as well as a perspective on how the field was developing. The emphasis is on the utility of combining a preventative community-centered orientation with an applied behavioral-analytic focus. The authors take general theoretical notions and demonstrate how they can be turned to concrete methods of dealing with specific practical problems that occur in implementing a ‘real-life’ program of community oriented intervention. The authors present an innovative model for developing a low cost and effective delivery system for mental health services in public schools. They describe the actual development and implementation of such a system in the school, and also include a comprehensive evaluative scheme for determining the efficacy of this type of endeavor. The actual behavior change strategies that are employed can be used effectively by teaching personnel or psychologists on either a large or small scale. A final unique feature of the volume is the inclusion of a program that will assist teachers and mental health professionals in helping elementary school students learn social problem-solving skills.

The Palgrave Handbook of Innovative Community and Clinical Psychologies

The Palgrave Handbook of Innovative Community and Clinical Psychologies
Author: Carl Walker
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 672
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3030711900

This handbook highlights a range of ground breaking, radical and liberatory clinical and critical community psychology projects from around the world. The disciplines of critical community psychology and clinical psychology are currently experiencing radical innovations that in this book are characterised as moving from the individualising practice realm toward an altogether more contextualising orientation. Both fields are responding to an array of political, social and economic injustices and a global political context. Community and clinical psychologists have found themselves reorienting their practice to confront, resist and subvert the structures that are so damaging to the lives of the vulnerable people they work with. This text posits that these approaches refute and resist the psychologising that has strengthened oppressive structures. Such practices are starting to engage in the political character of power-knowledge relationships that demand a more ‘action-oriented’ and less ‘clinical’ psychology praxis and there is a growing interest in, and commitment to, social justice in the field of mental wellbeing. Using examples of scholar, activist and practitioner work from around the world, this collection explores and documents those practices where the traditional remits of community and clinical psychology have been subverted, altered, stretched, changed and reworked in order to reframe practice around human rights, creativity, political activism, social change, space and place, systemic violence, community transformation, resource allocation and radical practices of disruption and direct action.

Community Psychology and the Socio-economics of Mental Distress

Community Psychology and the Socio-economics of Mental Distress
Author: Carl Walker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2017-09-16
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1137003049

Providing unique global perspectives on community psychology, this is exciting and important reading for students and researchers alike, written by leading experts in the field. Drawing on a wealth of experience and examples, it offers an essential guide to the political global context of this fast-developing area of psychology.

Creating Mental Illness

Creating Mental Illness
Author: Allan V. Horwitz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-04-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 022676589X

In this surprising book, Allan V. Horwitz argues that our current conceptions of mental illness as a disease fit only a small number of serious psychological conditions and that most conditions currently regarded as mental illness are cultural constructions, normal reactions to stressful social circumstances, or simply forms of deviant behavior. "Thought-provoking and important. . .Drawing on and consolidating the ideas of a range of authors, Horwitz challenges the existing use of the term mental illness and the psychiatric ideas and practices on which this usage is based. . . . Horwitz enters this controversial territory with confidence, conviction, and clarity."—Joan Busfield, American Journal of Sociology "Horwitz properly identifies the financial incentives that urge therapists and drug companies to proliferate psychiatric diagnostic categories. He correctly identifies the stranglehold that psychiatric diagnosis has on research funding in mental health. Above all, he provides a sorely needed counterpoint to the most strident advocates of disease-model psychiatry."—Mark Sullivan, Journal of the American Medical Association "Horwitz makes at least two major contributions to our understanding of mental disorders. First, he eloquently draws on evidence from the biological and social sciences to create a balanced, integrative approach to the study of mental disorders. Second, in accomplishing the first contribution, he provides a fascinating history of the study and treatment of mental disorders. . . from early asylum work to the rise of modern biological psychiatry."—Debra Umberson, Quarterly Review of Biology