Community and Health Psychology

COMPARE AND CONTRAST THE COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY AND PUBLIC HEALTH APPROACHES

1. INTRODUCTION

Community psychology seems to stress those issues which pertain to the community rather than the individual. Public health approaches focuses on preventing diseases and all type of distress before they occur and the emphasis is on the community at large than an individual. This assignment will compare and contrast community psychology and public health approaches in dealing with social problems. In community psychology, mental health model and social action model will be briefly discussed. The four types of public health approaches will be briefly discussed with the aim of contrasting with community psychology models. These approaches include; sanitary science, social medicine, community health and socio-ecological model.

2. COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY

In attempting to address social problems to the community different models in community psychology have been developed namely mental health model and social action model.

2.1 Mental health model

According to Dorken cited in Seedat (1988:40) mental health is based on the intention to prevent mental illness and its results pertaining to everyday living. It seeks to strengthen, conserve and develop human resources to prevent mental disorder. The preventative efforts does not only include those who are already affected in the community but also the healthy.

Caplan and Grenebaum cited in Seedat (1988:40) states that mental health model seeks to alleviate harmful environmental conditions, avoid unnecessary psychic pain and to strengthen the resistance of communities to inevitable future stressful experiences. Mental health model also represent an attempt to make scarce psychological services available to more people within a given catchment area by making the clinic more accessible to individual community members through reducing travelling costs.

2.2 Social action model

This model focuses on the wider community on the basis of...