Dear Sarah,

Thanks for raising some interesting issues and also for being open to different ways to respond to them, including allowing the possibility that the questions you are asking might be usefully reformulated in other frames of reference, at least for some members of the list. 

I think you raise issues of interest to many on this list. Thanks. However, in the context of this list, rather than ask whether clinical psychologists should concern themselves with community psychology as part of their efforts to advance social justice, I would ask whether there is a need to develop approaches to subjectivity and power which thoroughly reject individualistic, intra-psychic, medical model, mainstream ‘scientistic’, treatment approaches to promote what are positioned within dominant, metropolitan discourses as taken-for-granted, normatively-desirable, socially-just, forms of human social life. This is to ask the question of whether a radically critical approach to collective subjectivity and socially-constituted power is required. In my own, critical, frame of reference, it is required and clinical psychology – and community psychology too in many of its clinically psychologised manifestations - is an impediment to developing and deploying such a critical approach. 

That may not be an appropriate alternative question for your professional issues essay as a clinical psychology trainee but thinking about the issues raised by the reformulated at question, or discussing them on this discussion list, might lead to interesting alternative questions.

Good luck!

David