Toward a critical community psychological perspective on unemployment and mental health research

Psychological research has established that unemployment causes widespread psychological distress and ill health in communities but, arguably, little of this research is truly community psychological. In this paper we sketch out a critical community psychological perspective and use it to contribute to understanding of the role of psychosocial aspects of income in the experience and mental health of employed and unemployed members of low-income families in a severely deprived community context; to the development of innovative participatory methodology, and to promote the interests of impoverished unemployed people through the research process as well as through the research outcome. KEY WORDS: unemployment; critical community psychology. By social scientific standards, the grounds for confidence in the claim that unemployment causes widespread psychological distress, suboptimal mental health, and mental ill health are compelling. If sceptics had doubts about what is meant by “mental health,” they should have been settled by discovering how the concept of mental health had been operational-ized in a wide range of ways. They should also have taken comfort in finding that a large number of stan-dardized measures, whose validity and reliability have been established, had been adopted or where neces-sary developed. If sceptics had doubts about whether the relationship between poor mental health and un-employment reflected cause rather than association, they should have been reassured by reading how, in addition to repeated studies using cross sectional re-search designs showing that unemployed people have poorer mean mental health than groups of otherwise similar but employed people, a substantial number of well-designed, longitudinal, studies have tracke