Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

Articles

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2014)

Moving Beyond “Better Safe Than Sorry”: Realizing Community Potential to Transform Approaches to Psychiatric Hospitalization

Submitted
June 7, 2023
Published
2024-10-08

Abstract

This essay is composed of three parts to analyze how the field of community psychology can help transform aspects of psychiatric hospitalization that may inadvertently reify oppressive social constructs. I begin by describing approaches to treatment in psychiatric hospitalization that can unintentionally objectify the consumer/survivor and reinforce a standardized approach to treatment that disallows the empathy needed for an efficacious relationship between a healthcare professional and a consumer/survivor. In the next section, I examine how community psychology commitments are achieved through recovery-oriented care that challenges oppressive social constructs. In the final section, I consider the ways in which the rhetorical concept of agency might be enacted in the context of psychiatric hospitalization to create an environment that advances recovery-oriented care.