The promise (and potential pitfalls) of a public health approach in clinical psychology

Abstract

David Smail’s work provided an excellent example of how one might view individual distress within its social context, a context which ranged from the level of interpersonal relationships to the forces of global capital. In this paper, I review how individualised solutions to emotional distress are increasingly preferred over collective or structural approaches. Within medicine the discipline of public health has proved to be a useful counter-balance to this tendency. I discuss some of the benefits offered by adopting such an approach in mental health, while also acknowledging the need to address some of its problems (e.g. the rather uncritical use of heterogeneous diagnostic categories of varied validity and reliability).