Community Psychology Intervention Models

Study Notes

Mental Health Model: Focuses on improving individual and group mental health. Psychologists act as consultants, collaborating with other professionals and community workers to deliver services and promote wellbeing. Examples include support groups for individuals with HIV and collaborating with teachers to help children with emotional difficulties. This model emphasizes health promotion, care, and compassion.
Social Action Model: A bottom-up approach to empower communities to address systemic issues impacting wellbeing. It aims to create change at organizational and community levels by addressing adverse living conditions. Examples include advocating for the rights of marginalized groups, promoting women's empowerment, and campaigning for healthcare access (like the Treatment Action Campaign). Roles within this model can include advocate, consultant, trainer, researcher, and activist.

Relational Foundations: Building strong, supportive relationships based on respect, active listening, and a non-judgmental attitude. Adaptability and collaboration are key.
Activity Evolution: Using action research and co-creation to guide community-led initiatives. Focuses on leveraging community strengths and adapting methods to fit community needs.
Self-Management: Developing personal accountability and self-regulation, including managing anxiety and emotional challenges through reflective practice.
Process Awareness: Understanding the broader systemic influences at play, acknowledging structural inequalities, and grounding work in psychological theory and practice.

Social Psychology: Studies human interaction but lacks a strong focus on interventions for improving conditions.
Sociology: Focuses on community processes but doesn't emphasize individuals' interactions with the social structure.
Social Work: Concentrates on immediate condition improvement and legal support.
Clinical Psychology: Primarily focuses on treating individuals one at a time.

Colonialism: Historically involved European expansion, environmental exploitation, and the subjugation of Indigenous populations.
Coloniality: Refers to the colonizer's enduring psychological power, maintained through violence and control over narratives and self-perception. It creates psychic alienation and a split self.
Decoloniality: Aims to rehumanize the world by dismantling colonial hierarchies, promoting counter-discourses, and creating alternative ways of being.
Critiques of Psychology: Psychology has historically marginalized communities, reinforced white supremacy (e.g., through biased intelligence testing), and perpetuated problematic representations of "community."
Epistemological Resistance: Refusal to accept dominant knowledge as the only valid knowledge, embracing pluraversality (multiple ways of knowing).
Influential African Decolonial Thinkers: Fanon, Biko, and Manganyi offer insightful psychosocial theories on alienation and internalization of oppression among marginalized communities.

Complexity of Power Structures: The interconnectedness of power structures makes disentangling them challenging. Coloniality is self-perpetuating as victims can become perpetrators.
Essentialism: Some understandings of African psychology can lead to essentializing and homogenous representations of African culture and experiences.
Simplification of Self-Representation: Representations of marginalized groups might unintentionally reinforce colonial narratives and stereotypes.

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