Wellness without fairness: The missing link in psychology

Abstract

To promote human welfare, psychologists must advance two important goals: wellness and fairness. Hitherto, research on wellness or well-being has discovered connections among overall satisfaction with life and important facets of life, such as relationships, income, and physical health, but the connections among various types of wellness and specific aspects of fairness remain obscure. Research on justice in psychology, in turn, has focused largely on the impact of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on job performance and not so much on wellness outcomes. I argue that psychologists must explore in depth the association among various types of wellness, such as interpersonal, occupational, physical, and psychological, and diverse kinds of fairness, such as distributive, procedural, interpersonal, cultural, developmental, retributive, and intrapersonal. The pursuit of wellness without fairness will not yield the outcomes individuals and communities need. We must make more explicit the relationship between justice or injustice and flourishing in life.

Social justice and remembering “the personal is political” in counselling and psychotherapy: So, what can therapists do?

“…This idea captures a simple way of understanding social justice as applied to counselling and psychotherapy. Firstly, though we are doing something very personal, often working with people at individual or small group levels, considering issues relating to the individual or small group, these issues are so intertwined with our broader social and political environments that they are very hard to disentangle or separate (Prilleltensky, ). Secondly, our work can have a political function if it challenges traditionally unequal structures and facilitates new power relations.…”

Critical psychology: A geography of intellectual engagement and resistance.

“…Latin American CP draws on liberation theology (Lowy, 1996), whereas South Afri can CP has also been influenced by Black thought and consciousness, including the ideas of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko (1946-1977see Hook, 2004). North American CP draws on moral positions (Prilleltensky, 2013;Tolman, 2001) challenging social injustices in areas such as gender, race, immigration, poverty, and sexual preference (e.g., Fine, 2012;Nelson, 2013;Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2013;Sweeney & Opotow, 2013). Considering the North American usage of the word, the term critical may include connections with critical race theory, critical dis ability studies, critical pedagogy, queer studies, feminist standpoint theory, some postmodern theories, or with the project of antipsychiatry.…”

Education, Welfare Reform and Psychological Well-Being: A Critical Psychology Perspective

“…Lupton (2014) has argued that 'The key point, of course […] is that the problem of educational inequalities is caused by society, not by schools' (p. 922) and 'Teachers on their own cannot make all the difference, although they can certainly make a difference' (p. 923). Critical psychologists have long argued that individual psychologists treating psychological distress within the individual is at best misguided, given the role of social and political factors in influencing well-being (Prilleltensky, 2013). Similarly, it should be acknowledged that schools cannot address on their own the link between poverty and education, given the significant role of broader social policies.…”

“…This approach, however, has been critiqued by 'critical psychology', as underestimating the impact of the social context on the individual, and ignoring the political nature of psychology (Parker, 2007;Prilleltensky and Fox, 1997). There is no single 'critical psychology' (Dafermos et al, 2013;Teo, 2015); critical psychologists have argued that psychological discourse should consider not only wellness, but also fairness or justice, given the evidence demonstrating the significant interrelationships between wellness and fairness (Prilleltensky, 2013). Research focusing on the 'social determinants of health' has found that mental health problems are strongly associated with multiple social, economic and political factors: 'People are made vulnerable to mental ill-health by deeprooted poverty, social inequality, and discrimination' (Allen et al, 2014, p. 402).…”