CHICAGO, IL / AGILITYPR.NEWS / May 20, 2020 / For decades, community psychologists have used their psychology training to identify solutions to challenging problems like neighborhood violence and undiagnosed illnesses across large populations. At the forefront of this field is Leonard Jason, a professor of clinical and community psychology and director of the Center for Community Research at DePaul University.
“I was around during the Vietnam War, and it was a time filled with social change movements like the civil rights and women’s movements. At that time, most psychologists were trained to deliver what is called a traditional medical model treatment with one-on-one psychotherapy, which involves waiting for clients to visit their offices,” said Jason, who’s been on faculty at DePaul since 1975.
He and other community psychologists noticed several problems with this model. “Most people were being treated at a time when their disorders were more entrenched and long-standing, and these might be the times when it was most difficult to bring about change. This was also a passive model and did not attempt to prevent the problem in the first place,” he said.
“Early in my career, I wondered how I could bring a community psychology perspective to my work as a psychologist. And that is when I started thinking about prevention and policy-level interventions that focused on social justice,” said Jason.
At its core, community psychology centers on three aspects: preventing problems, rather than treating problems in both mental and physical health areas; concentrating on the larger ecosystem and the multiple levels of intervention needed beyond the individual; and a social justice facet that focuses on providing equal access to treatment and resources, said Jason.
“Community psychologists are like community organizers,” explained Jason. “But they are different from them in that they use theory and rigorous research methods to bring about structural systems change. We are agents of change as we take a public health approach to psychology.”
The public health approach focuses on prevention, bringing in community members to actively collaborate on how to bring about social justice change. It’s about understanding the person in context, and not just focusing on the individual, according to Jason.
“In our work, we don’t parachute ourselves as experts into a community, but rather collaborate with community groups to use their wisdom and guidance to identify solutions to problems. This is what differentiates us,” said Jason.
Chicago-based research
DePaul’s Center for Community Research conducts community-based research throughout Chicago and internationally. One project focused on a very stigmatizing illness known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, ME/CFS, and aiming to understand how many youth had this illness and what their characteristics were. Adults and youth with this illness had often been thought to have a yuppie flu like illness, and this characterization is rather stigmatizing.
“In our research, we found in a sample of about 10,000 youth, that this illness does occur among youth, most predominantly among African American and Latinx youth, and only about 5% had been diagnosed,” said Jason.
This is where the importance of community psychology lies. By working with a marginalized group that experiences discrimination associated with ME/CFS and identifying an unmet need by diagnosing members of the population, the work uncovered adequate expertise to identify those who are ill, and discover that most youth with this illness were not being treated.
“Community psychology, in a sense, tries to identify community issues, such as a youth not being appropriately diagnosed with ME/CFS, and this type of research can galvanize the public to bring about change,” Jason said.
