434 Community Psychology
the significance of these powerful social movements and
processes as the field of community psychology was being
founded:
Freedom was far from the only objective that brought the sixties
to a boil. The other was an amalgam of equality and fraternity—
in particular, solidarity with the poor and the low caste. The civil
rights movement was the seedbed, the War on Poverty a contin-
uation, and a host of other projects from the Peace Corps to the
revolutionism of the Third World, whatever their obvious dif-
ferences, rang variations on the same theme. Throughout the
variations, the hope was to regenerate a public sphere: to univer-
salize political rights; to move the grass roots closer to power; to
animate public-mindedness; to oppose illegitimate authority in
the name of a public that was the proper source of sovereignty.
Individualism was suspect, value was placed on cooperative-
ness, collective projects, and at the maximum, “the beloved
community.” (Gitlin, 1997, pp. 291–292)Embedded in the social upheaval of the 1960s was the
founding of the field of community psychology. Below are a
few events from 1965, the year of the Swampscott Confer-
ence and the dawn of a new psychology:
- A second mass civil rights march from Selma to
Montgomery, Alabama followed under National Guard
protection. - President Johnson sent troops to Vietnam.
- Over 20,000 protesters attended a rally in Washington, DC
against the Vietnam War sponsored by the Students for a
Democratic Society. - Poet Robert Lowell and others boycotted the White House
Festival of the Arts in protest against the Vietnam War. - Cesar Chavez organized and unionized agricultural work-
ers in California. - President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965
into law. - 20,000 faculty and students attended a teach-in, organized
by the Vietnam Day committee on the University of
California–Berkeley campus. - The first draft card was publicly burned at a New York
protest organized by the War Resister’s League. - Malcolm X was assassinated (Glennon, 1995; Morgan,
1991).
From Community Mental Health
to Community Psychology
The community mental health movement, which began in
earnest after the end of World War II, was evolving at the
same time as the civil-rights movement, the second wave of
the women’s movement, and protests against the Vietnam
War. The visibility of these political movements increased
the overall interest of citizens to be actively involved in
their communities and to become more informed about the
policies and social norms for justice. In addition to the long-
standing tradition of organizing in nonwhite and poor
communities, a history of grassroots community organizing
was gaining momentum in white and educated communities.
As these movements increased their visibility and impact,
more and more people became active in their local communi-
ties and in discussing or debating these national events. The
American consciousness was being raised about the impor-
tance of community.
In the context of the tumultuous events at the community,
societal, and political arenas throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
the mental health professions began to recognize the value
of an expanded perspective on the causes of and solutions
to mental health problems. The legitimacy of prevention of
mental health problems was presented in Action for Mental
Health(1961), a report published by the Joint Commission
on Mental Illness and Health, which was established in 1955.
Also in 1955, the NIMH convened a conference at Stanford
University (the “Stanford Conference”), which advocated for
more community and preventive services in contrast to indi-
vidual psychotherapy. Illustratively, at this conference, Erich
Lindemann, a Harvard psychoanalyst, presented his commu-
nity approach to the delivery of mental health services in
Wellesley, Massachusetts (Strother, 1956, 1987).
By the early 1960s, NIMH, the primary source of funds
for the community mental health movement, was increasing
its efforts to develop a national agenda for community-
oriented mental health services. This agenda was developed
under the leadership of Robert Felix, the director of NIMH
and a public-health-trained psychiatrist who had planned the
initiative since the NIMH was created in 1949. In 1963, fed-
eral legislation was passed (Public Law 88-164) that enabled
communities to apply for funds to construct community men-
tal health centers, and in 1965, Congress amended the legis-
lation to provide grants for staffing these centers. NIMH staff
members were particularly interested in seeing that the core
mental health professions—psychiatry, psychology, social
work, and nursing—received training to ensure the quality of
these future community mental health services. During this
time, the community mental health movement also served
as the impetus for attention to mental disabilities as a national
issue and helped to provide states with funding to assist fam-
ilies and family members living with mental disorders.
Throughout the 1960s, community-oriented psycholo-
gists expressed discontent within the profession of clinical