Pathway to community psychology

Some time before I began my university degree, a friend of mine experienced a traumatic brain injury. After witnessing his journey, I selected disability studies as a major area of study during my undergraduate psychology degree. This led in turn to my interest and involvement with a community-based rehabilitation program. During this time I was asked by a participant of the program: ‘Why haven’t you told me how you got your brain injury?’ I clearly did not fit this person’s perception of a staff member. Although I took this as a compliment, I was affected by the enormity of the perceived gap between staff members and the brain injury survivors in the program, one I increasingly viewed as arbitrary. The extent of discrimination inherent in attitudes of the wider community toward people with disability was becoming clear in the interactions I witnessed and at times ignorantly enacted. It was through my relationships that I learned of how notions of ‘normality’ could be problematic.

Since my exposure to disability studies, I have chosen to work in various roles serving people with disability within community services. My postgraduate training in community psychology involved an explicit shift toward a practice centred on values of social justice accompanied by an acknowledgement of the multiple contexts within which people live. Taking a social determinants of health approach in the context of the transition to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is an example of how studying community psychology continues to assist me. I believe that both what led me to disability studies and my experience of it, reflects a strength I brought to practising psychology – namely, valuing people with lived experience as expert citizens.

For those starting out, I would recommend seeking out mentors. I am thankful that I was able to do this both through the registrar program for Area of Practice Endorsement in Community Psychology, which I now hold, and the ongoing supervision I still find invaluable. In saying all this, the program participant who kindly tolerated my ‘mentoring’ through a disability studies placement over 10 years ago, became one of the most important mentors I have had to date.