Freudians argue that some people’s “personality problems” origin from the absence of a father role in their life, and the fact that their mother consigned them to another caregiver during childhood. A psychiatrist may prescribe drugs for such people so that they can be better integrated into the school environment and learn social skills. The debate between nature and nurture is still going on.
If we need to address community problems like AIDS, homelessness, school drop-out, teenage pregnancy, drug dependence, and violent crime, we need various and sustained interventions. Unfortunately, in our society, simple intervention seems to dominate. Community psychology aims to solve these problems in a variety of ways. Community psychology looks at social problems, social institutions, and other Settings that affect groups and organizations and the individuals within them. Communities are divided geographically, and we can set different levels of intervention depending on the size of the community institution (McLeroy et al., 2003). The goal of community psychology is to maximize the well-being of communities and individuals using innovative and diverse interventions designed in collaboration with affected community members and other disciplines within and outside psychology.
Community psychology focuses more on prevention than treatment. This is a very important and key concept in the discipline. On the one hand, treatment often comes too late in the whole intervention process, with therapeutic relationships occurring long after an individual has developed a problem, so such treatments are often ineffective. Prevention, on the other hand, may defeat any trauma before it occurs and thus “save” the individual or even society as a whole from developing a problem. Community psychology can play an active rather than passive role.
Prevention interventions in community psychology can be divided into three levels. Primary prevention is to trying to intervene at the earliest moment of a problem, like vaccination (a vaccine against a specific disease). “Keep healthy people healthy” and “prevent predisposed people from developing problems.” Secondary prevention is to address a problem at an early stage, before it becomes more severe and persistent. Tertiary Prevention are attempts to reduce the severity of a problem when it persists.
Reference:
McLeroy, K. R., Norton, B. L., Kegler, M. C., Burdine, J. N., & Sumaya, C. V. (2003). Community-based interventions. American Journal of Public Health, 93(4), 529–533. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.93.4.529