4811 - Assignment 1

What follows is a detailed analysis of community psychology and public health approaches to social problems. We will be looking at not only the comparisons but also the contrasting elements of the two approaches. Attention will be given to the development of the approaches while we look each approach’s different models.

Community psychology in America was tied up with the mental health reform movements in the USA. The care for the mentally ill in America and other Western countries have been characterized by sporadic reforms, followed by long periods of relative neglect.

The 3 most important reform movements were the Moral treatment in the 1800s, Mental hygiene in the 1900s and Deinstitutionalisation in the 1960s. Mental illness was treated as a social rather than an individual problem as well as a move towards prevention rather than cure. None of them were effective at practical level.

While the Moral treatment movement was taking place, the sanitary science model was being developed. Public health had to do with what goes in and what comes out of body. Primary cause of most diseases are microbes from human waste. Interventions were mainly prohibitive laws that govern what goes in and out of bodies.

Regulations on where to defecate and urinate, ventilation for sweating, lighting, food storage and sewage disposal. Food and drug laws to regulate what people ate and drank.

Non Europeans where seen as dirty and likely to infect the Europeans. They were sent to native locations. The public health movement was not discriminating like this.

In the time of community health mental hygiene movements in the 1900s and Deinstitutionalisation movements in the 1960s, the social medicine model on the public health side emerged.

Sanitary science couldn’t control what people do in private (bathing, sexual intercourse, brushing teeth) as this was beyond enforcement.

Emerged between 1930 and 1950s, social medicine encouraged people to look after themselves – not...