Still wanting change, still working for justice: An introduction to the special issue on social justice training in health service psychology.

Abstract

There has not been a comprehensive analysis of social justice training in all disciplines of health service psychology (HSP) since the special issue of Training and Education in Professional Psychology 10 years ago. This article introduces a special issue titled "Social Justice Training in Health Service Psychology" by reviewing major themes in the literature since the last special issue and noting points of needed attention and scholarship that are both new and continuing since the last special issue. In particular, the authors highlight that training in social justice work is a critical need but that HSP has yet to comprehensively integrate social justice work into its training and practice. The special issue includes eight articles that speak to the role of HSP in addressing this critical societal need and present inspiring and innovative examples of how training can be implemented across the training sequence to improve competency in social justice work. The articles in this issue offer both theoretical and empirically validated examples of integrating social justice into HSP training. Public Significance StatementThe present article reviews literature written over the last 10 years to highlight major themes to date in social justice training among health service psychology programs. The article also introduces a series of articles on social justice training that aim to increase well-being in various marginalized communities.

The Future of Counselling Psychology Education and Training in Canada: A Post-Conference Reflection

“…(p. 190) After all, it was small groups of counselling psychologists who were at the forefront of the start of the multicultural movement in the United States (see Korman, 1974;Ridley & Kleiner, 2003). The current social justice movement in counselling psychology--referred to commonly as the discipline's fifth force-brought together feminists and multiculturalists (see Enns et al, 2013) and has now expanded to attend to the psychological needs and resilience of multiple communities who historically have been marginalized (see Burnes & Christensen, 2020;Fouad & Prince, 2012). Alongside this movement in the United States, counselling psychologists in Canada have also made significant contributions to scholarship on LGBTQ2+ persons (Alderson, 2015), newcomer communities (Sinacore et al, 2015;Yohani et al, 2019), Indigenous peoples (Stewart & Marshall, 2015), multicultural counselling (Moodley, 2007), and social justice more broadly (Audet & Paré, 2018;Ginsberg & Sinacore, 2015), to name a few.…”

Social Justice Identity Development for International Counseling Psychology Students

“…As international counseling psychology students move on to Phases 2 and 3, a lack of exposure to diverse cultural perspectives and limited access to social justice work opportunities become major barriers for social justice identity development. To remove these barriers, training programs should challenge and dismantle the colonizing, Eurocentric practices in research, teaching, and clinical practice in the current system (Burnes & Christensen, 2020), and include discussions about social injustice around the world as well as the different definitions of social justice, human rights, and equality across cultures (Hurley et al, 2013). As for access to social justice work opportunities, faculty members are encouraged to gather information on funding resources for international students and visa issues (APA Division 17 International Section, 2020) and proactively initiate a discussion with international counseling psychology students about the implications of financial or visa issues when pursuing certain social justice work opportunities within the United States or abroad.…”

Economic Justice and Vocational Psychology: Towards Community Change

“…While much of the focus of training in counseling and psychology programs is focused on how to work with individual change issues, over the last couple of decades training programs in counseling and psychology have emphasized the importance of helping graduate students learn skills that help them make systemic changes (Blustein et al, 2019). Several training programs have enacted social justice initiatives within their training and others have made suggestions on how counseling and psychology programs could do a better job of this (Burnes & Christiansen, 2020). A major theme of training students in social justice is to focus the training on the development of advocacy skills (Ramirez Stege et al, 2017).…”