Origins of Community Psychology

COMMUNITY AND HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY PSY461Q

ASSIGNMENT 01

ǀ ORIGINS OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY ǀ

Key Consepts

- Community Psychology

- Public Health

Introduction

Similarities between Community Psychology and Public Health

Public health ‘s main concern is the prevention of disease and distress before it occurs.

The focus is directed on the public and society within the socio-environmental context.

Therefore public health tries to prevent diseases from occurring in the first place, unlike convensional medicine that treats illness and disease after it presents itself. There has been various models/movements in public health that has atemted to acheve this goal of prevention some by means of education in regards to healthy living and choises and some by changing legeslation so that people would act in a healthy manner in public.

Community psychology like public health is concerened with the prevention of mental illness in opisition with the mainstream individualistic psychology that treats mental illness after it occurs. Community psychology does not only focus on mental illness as an individual phenomenon. Community psychology operates from the perspective that mental illness is a social phenomenon. Therefore both community psychology and public health view pathology as rooted not only in the individual but also in the brawder social context in which individuals and groups live. Aspects such as the influence of poverty on the maintanince and development of pathology is taken in to consideration, but both these perspectives also moved beyond the view that poverty for example has an influence on the development of pathology and that this is the beginning and end of it. Both perspectives also look at the influence of the brouder political system and the very structure of society and the influence this has on the maintenance of for example poverty. This makes both public health and community psychology more than...