International Society of Critical Health Psychology - Aims

Aims

Initially, the Society had three primary aims:

• To promote increased debate about critical ideas, qualitative and participatory research methods, and social, political and cultural issues within health psychology.
• To facilitate contact and collaboration among critical health psychologists.
• To promote the development of resources and training opportunities in critical health psychology.

In 2011, these were modified to the following:

• Encourage, enable and disseminate research and scholarship in critical health psychology and provide opportunities for debate and discussion in this field.
• Provide a forum for scrutinising, challenging and questioning what is said and done in the purported pursuit of promoting and improving "health" by health psychologists and others.
• Operate as a community of scholars (in the widest definition of that term and absolutely not restricted to people with formal affiliations to a university or other academic body), offering each other mutual support in the pursuit of critical approaches to health.
• In particular, nurture and help early-career, young and emerging scholars in the field, and engage with and learn from communities and groups conventionally excluded or under-represented.

Members of the Society take a variety of theoretical and methodological viewpoints. However, as with other critical psychologists, they share a common dissatisfaction with the positivist assumptions of much of mainstream psychology and its ignorance of broader social and political issues. Instead, they share an interest in various critical ideas (e.g. social constructionism, post-modernism, feminism, marxism, etc.) and various qualitative and participatory methods of research (e.g. discourse analysis, grounded theory, action research, ethnography, etc.) and their relevance to understanding health and illness. Further, they share an awareness of the social, political and cultural dimensions of health and illness (e.g. poverty, racism, sexism, political oppression, etc.) and an active commitment to reducing human suffering and promoting improved quality of life, especially among those sections of society most in need.