About SIG members

About SIG members

Paul Kelly
I am a clinical psychologist working in a Primary Care Psychology Service. My main interests are the ways in which peoples lives/identities are affected by the unequal distribution of power/resources in our society. I feel that the mainstream organisation of psychology/psychotherapy often both reflects and supports an unequal status quo which serves the most powerful in society. Through its emphasis on individualised/decontextualised and internalised descriptions of peoples distress, psychotherapy often contributes to blaming victims for their own distress.
I feel that community and critical psychology have the potential to challenge some of the dominant ideas in mainstream psychology and in doing so I hope this will contribute to a more equal society.

Penny Priest
I am a trainee Clinical Psychologist at Birmingham University, employed by Shropshire County Primary Care Trust. As well as being a member of this SIG, I am also involved in the UK Ecopsychology Network, which reflects my feeling about the fundamental importance of the environments we find ourselves in and the impact they have on us. I have a particular interest in the way the food disorders that exist in society have an impact on the individual. Looking at the way society produces, distributes and relates to food can also be illuminating of the way society causes distress to individuals in other ways. I also believe that, while it is important to understand the reasons for a person's experience of distress, it is even more fundamental to explore what powers people have, if any, to improve their situation.
Email: pennypriest@supanet.com

Paul Moloney
I am a Counselling Psychologist working in a Primary Care Mental Health Team.
When it comes to thinking about the origins of my interest in community and critical psychology, then I have to admit that these are more numerous than I usually realise and (as the saying goes) perhaps too numerous to mention. It may be that my childhood in an often warring family that didn't know whether it was Irish/English, working or middle class was significant: from an early age offering practical lessons in the link between social background, the experience of personal distress, and the limitations of recieved/official wisdom on how best to cope with it!
Though if I really had to narrow things down, I would say that the main roots of my interest probably lie in my experience as a community based social worker and counsellor within the mental health system. For anyone working in these areas, I think it soon becomes obvious how economic deprivation and also oppression at the social and institutional levels can lead to the kinds of problems that prompt many people to seek psychotherapy and counselling. The experience of this kind of work may also show how these negative social forces can channel communities, families and eventually individuals into forms of conduct that are destructive of themselves and others, and that may eventually corrode the self confidence and indeed sanity of even the most resilient of people. For me, these observations were also matched by a range of converse insights - for example, into the way in which for many people, tangible gains in mental health seemed to be linked to opportunities to achieve greater access to those social, economic and material resources that were associated with a greater sense of control and meaning within their lives. The opportunity to work in community based settings - (as opposed to the more removed atmosphere of the clinic or consulting room) - also led to my growing awareness of the exaggerated claims of treatment effectiveness advanced by many well-meaning mental health practitioners, and of the extent to which service users' views on their own treatment could be marginalised by the former (which in hindsight had too often included myself).
These kinds of observation are of course commonplace within the critical mental health and political literatures. And it was here that, in particular, the writings of the clinical psychologist David Smail seemed to offer a cogent and compelling framework in which I could begin to make sense of my experiences. In contrast, my own training as a therapeutic psychologist seemed to pay scant attention to these possibilities. Instead, the focus seemed to be mainly on the use of putative techniques for rearranging the contents of client's heads, based upon the assumption that benign personal change would almost inevitably follow . It was my dissatisfaction with this state of affairs that steered me toward making contact with other psychologists with similar views, and to the co-founding of the WMRCCP SIG. The latter representing a collective effort to continue to develop approaches to helping that recognise the extent to which personal distress may have more to do with the properties of a malign world than of the sufferer's internal psychology.

Carl Harris
Why am I interested in Critical and Community Psychology?
Well I used to think that I'm only interested in community but now I'm not so sure.
My first degree was in political economy. My second was in political philosophy. At this stage I felt that there were particularly significant gaps in my understanding of human matters (how do events at a macro economic and political level impact upon the lives of individual people, and what do we need to know about the needs and potentialities of the human being in order to organise our society in better ways?) and that I had little to offer people on a practical basis.
So I decided to try and become a clinical psychologist. During this time I had to convert my original degree to psychology, and do the usual things like be an assistant psychologist and, eventually, get on a clinical psychology course. Like most people, doing this took up a lot of my time and energy. The commitment it required meant that I invested a lot of my self in the process and somehow, along the way, I lost sight of what had made me want to become a clinical psychologist in the first place.
There were still small signs of the old me, for example I was interested in systemic ideas and social constructionism, but I had lost sight of the goal. Coming across community psychology may well be the thing that allowed me to remember who I am and what I was intending to do with my working life.
Doing clinical psychology has been a hugely valuable experience. It has broadened my understanding of people and has given me ways and means of getting to know both others and myself that I never had before. But I became too individualistic in my view of human practices, too inclined to pathologise and too comfortable in a passive "let's see who can get over the obstacles to get to see us" kind of a way.
Doing community psychology gives me a way of reconnecting the personal and the broader social issues; and that goes for me as well as for the clients. I have found that, for me, it can fit with some of the elements of clinical psychology but that it also provides a viewpoint from which to be critical (with both a big and a small "c").

Information about other SIG members will be posted in due course.