[Commpsych] FW: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Call for community psychology chapter contributions

[Lauren BREEN]

________________________________

From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List on behalf of Carl Walker
Sent: Wed 29/07/2009 10:02 PM
To: COMMUNITYPSYCHUK at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Call for community psychology chapter contributions



Dear All,

 

Katherine Johnson, Liz Cunningham and I are community psychologists from the UK who are editing a new community psychology text. It will explore global community psychologies as alternative ways to challenge recent global political and economic changes and their associated mental health ideologies. The details are below

 

Best wishes

 

Carl Walker

 

 

 

Invitation for chapters the proposed book:

 

Community psychology and the economics of mental health: Global perspectives

 

Editors:

Carl Walker, University of Brighton, (c.j.walker at brighton.ac.uk)

Katherine Johnson, University of Brighton, (k.e.johnson at brighton.ac.uk)

Liz Cunningham, University of Brighton, (l.cunningham at brighton.ac.uk)

 

Background

The following document sets out a proposal for an edited book that will use a critical community psychology framework to explore ways in which classic neoliberal notions of mental health treatment can be contested. 

Despite the often value-free rhetoric that has constructed Globalisation as the proliferation of science and technology around the world, some critics have suggested that it represents the global spread of the neoliberal Washington consensus where free market fundamentalism, supply side and trickle-down economics are celebrated as panaceas for a declining social order (Gray, 1998). The IMF and World Bank, formerly constructed to ensure global economic stability and development following the Second World War now exist to provide neoliberal ideological and financial support to desperate developing countries where thinly veiled western special interests lead to contracting economies (Stiglitz, 2002). For example, 'development' interventions to redeem Africa have often focussed on strengthening Africa's productive capacity to provide cheap raw material for western industries (Nsamenang et al 2007) while in Argentina and Uruguay, the faithful adherence of successive administrations to monetarism have left profound scars, soaring poverty and social exclusion (Montero & Diaz, 2007). This ethos of economic and political management has culminated in a particularly severe and possibly prolonged global recession, often experienced by different countries at different times (Turner, 2008)

The relationship between mental health difficulties and financial strain, poverty and inequality is supported by a growing and robust literature (Lewis & Araya, 2002, Roy-Byrne et al 2003, Walker, 2007). Rather than contextualize the suffering that has characterised many peoples' lives as a result of pernicious political and economic ideologies, mental health has been substantially viewed as an individual issue that requires psychological or pharmacological intervention.

The UK serves as a good example of this framework where the solution to the mental health crises has been formulated around the need for short term individual modes of therapy that return people to paid employment. However despite the assertions of the UK government that increased access to psychological therapies and, specifically CBT, is the universal panacea to the mental health and employment crisis, such an approach has attracted criticism for that very focus on individual solutions to problems that are usually politically, economically and institutionally driven. 

While these models do not predominate universally, a growing number of countries share this individualistic mainstream model. For example in countries as broad as Argentina, Cameroon and India, psychology has been largely mainly modelled on the clinical approach to mental disease that significantly borrow theories from the West (Saforcada et al 2007, Montero & Diaz, 2007, Nsamenang et al 2007, Bhatia & Sethi, 2007).

 

The text

In our accounts of the way that mental wellbeing is constituted and managed, there has been relatively little focus on the everyday relevance of the political, economic and social changes that we have nebulously come to understand as Globalisation. In the context of mental health, different forms of community psychology have been mobilised to resist modernist deficit models that often marginalise indigenous knowledge systems and community processes (Nsamenang et al 2007).  And while it would be naïve to provide one single definition of community psychology or assume that its application is unproblematic in different cultural contexts (Nsamenang et al 2007), community psychologies, as a broad aggregation of approaches that coalesce around the generic principles of social change, participation and empowerment, could be a worthwhile perspective from which to conceptualise resistance to the above socioeconomic developments.  For many, the recent global recession has only exacerbated the problematic relationships between constructions of mental wellbeing and treatment, and political and economic ideologies. This text will explore global community psychologies as alternative ways to challenge recent global political and economic changes and their associated mental health ideologies.

 

Proposed sections

 

*	Economies of distress 

This section contains contributions on the way that the neoliberal politico-economic ideology has impacted on different local and global settings. There will be a focus on varying narratives of social inequality and mental wellbeing. Specifically this section will explore mental health experiences in the context of historic and cultural developments in social and economic governance. 

·         Ideology, marginality and mental well-being

Contributions in this section will critically explore the way that individualizing, pathologising and marginalizing mental health ideologies and institutions around the world have evolved to manufacture relief in the shape of discourses which serve the prevailing political consensus, rather than challenge structural notions of wellbeing.

*	Global social change projects 

A detailed account of a number of varied global social change projects that have promoted mental well-being through social, rather than solely individualized and medicalising, modes of action. These might explore key contextual points of action that focus on lived experiences of such areas as employment, education, debt, enculturation, refugee communities and sexualities.

*	Critical community methodologies 

This section will be an ideological and methodological critique of the utility of local forms of community psychology and how they relate to predominant cultural beliefs that frame definitions of health and illness. 

 

 

If you are interested in contributing to this edited book, please reply with details of your proposed chapter by 30 September 2009 to:

 

Carl Walker

School of Applied Social Science

University of Brighton

Brighton

BN1 9PH

Tel: 01273 643475

Email: c.j.walker at brighton.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

Carl Walker

School of Applied Social Science

University of Brighton

Mayfield House

Falmer

Brighton BN1 9PH

t. 01273 643475

e. c.j.walker at brighton.ac.uk

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