The Palgrave Handbook of Innovative Community and Clinical Psychologies

Book excerpt: 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.