Student Advocacy in Turbulent Times: Psychology Students for Social Responsibility at Widener University

This is the transcript of a workshop that took place on the grounds of Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania on March 16, 2019.

I want to begin by acknowledging that this workshop is taking place on the unceded territory of the Lenape people. As we talk about politics and identity both in and outside of the consulting room, it is important for me to acknowledge my position as a settler in this continent and the frame for this work that this position offers me. I have privilege as a descendant of colonizers, and my position as a White person with access to education affects my understanding of politics and identity in important ways.

Psychology as a field is connected to White supremacy and colonialism because it developed in primarily White, Western nations by primarily White men and others who were generally privileged in terms of gender, class, and race. It is important to acknowledge these roots because it informs us of our position when sitting with clients. This history, and even continuing tradition in the field, of mainstream thinking that privileges particular ideas of health, safety, family, and what it means to be an individual affects us and the work we do (McNamara & Naepi, 2018). It is notable that the political climate as it is now, seems turbulent to even the most privileged among us, but many of our clients or would-be clients have felt such turbulence in the system their entire lives. This gap between the lived realities of many psychologists and their clients is one that Psychology Students for Social Responsibility at Widener (PsySSR-Widener) would like to address in a variety of ways. We are a student-run organization for graduate students in psychology who focus on social justice and mental health. I would like to read our mission statement to offer a sense of who we are and what we do:

The Widener chapter of Psychology Students for Social Responsibility (PsySSR-Widener) encourages involvement of psychologists at every level in mental health and social justice movements. We believe that social and policy changes at the graduate program, community, and political levels are an important part of our professional practice, and that we can and should be advocates for justice at the health, social, and economic levels. PsySSR-Widener firmly believes that this practice involves both visibility in movements and personal education and exploration. To that end, we are committed to connecting our academic community to activist organizing and to providing opportunities to explore identity, cultural competency, and anti-oppressive practice.

This group exists as a tool for future psychologists to further develop their own understanding of their identity and its impact on the work they do as well as a central organizing body for political advocacy work that supports clients at various social levels.

I have been in a leadership position in this organization for the past 2 academic years, and it has felt, at various times: exciting, stressful, heart-warming, hopeless, hopeful, and exhausting. There is not an easy-to-follow template for integrating social justice work with graduate education in psychology, unfortunately. Much of the work we have done since our inception in 2016 has been navigating organizational hurdles such as leadership, developing a mission, and membership. I am grateful to have such passionate people on the team with me, however, and I do want to share some of the work we have accomplished as an organization in this brief period.

First, we held a voter registration drive in some of the most marginalized communities around Philadelphia for the midterm elections in 2018. Separately, we created a handout detailing the voting history and reported stances of congressional candidates in Pennsylvania on various mental health issues including opioid addiction, health care coverage, and veteran suicide prevention. Related to the opioid epidemic, PsySSR orchestrated a phone blast in support of Safehouse, a nonprofit corporation attempting to open a supervised injection site in Philadelphia. The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania filed a civil lawsuit against this organization in effort to have supervised consumption sites deemed illegal by a federal court. PsySSR-Widener supports harm reduction efforts like such a site because research has suggested it can limit overdose, reduce public health risks such as unsafe needle disposal, and increase access to health care for marginalized injection drug users (Potier et al., 2014). This spring, PsySSR-Widener is connecting with Fair Districts PA to provide nonpartisan education to voters at polls regarding the practice of gerrymandering with the goal of passing a constitutional amendment that would disallow lawmakers to manipulate district boundaries to favor their political party.

Political and social advocacy efforts like those I have just shared are crucial in developing a more just, less traumatic world for ourselves and our clients, and it is also important that we have the knowledge and space for self-reflection necessary for us to be a safer, less retraumatizing space for our clients. To this end, PsySSR-Widener has begun to host two regularly occurring programs: Peer Talks and an Anti-Oppressive Practices Reading Group. The Peer Talks pull on the areas of expertise and passion from our student body. These peer experts share a 15-minute presentation on the topic of their choice, including background and relevance to clinicians, and lead a discussion regarding that topic. These talks have covered areas such as sex work, effects of redlining on Black communities, climate change, pathologization of marginalized identities in psychology, children in political advocacy, and the effects of the intergenerational trauma of slavery on Black communities in the United States.

The Anti-Oppressive Practices Reading Group pulls literature from a variety of academic and nonacademic sources, including social work literature, activist communities, and community psychology literature. Once a month, a group of interested students read an article or series of articles and discuss the ideas presented. Examples of discussions in this reading group have included the origins of anti-oppressive practice in social work, prison abolition, and decolonizing psychology.

The feminist concept that the personal is political remains true in psychology (Winter, 2019), and PsySSR-Widener is committed to supporting current and future psychologists such as those of us in this room in developing connections between our personal identities, the private space of the consulting room, and the larger social structures that make up our social and political worlds. Given that clinical psychology as a field has most often been focused on the individual, rather than the collective or political (Hays, 2008), this task can be daunting. We as an organization have struggled with engaging our fellow students in a consistent way, and I imagine there are many reasons for the challenges we have faced. Students in general, and students at the graduate level in particular, are tired. We have limited time and energy for ourselves and our personal lives, much less, professional activities outside of school, work, and practicum or internship placements. Even for areas of social justice that we are passionate about, it can be easy to feel drained, burnt out, hopeless, or helpless when faced with such daunting tasks as building a more supportive community or effecting change in a political system.

Even within the graduate psychology program at Widener, students have diverse interests and ties to causes that make it difficult to organize into one singular group. While some students are primarily focused on racial inequality, others want to make an impact on climate change, and still others care most about the ever-increasing tuition increases that make higher education inaccessible to so many and highly stressful for even more students. Many of these issues overlap, but it is difficult as a singular organization to address all of them. It can be easy, too, for many of us to avoid or dissociate from these social issues if they do not directly affect us. As I said before, many of us in psychology have privilege in important ways. Many of us, of course, have our own marginalized identities, but for me, as an example, I am safe because of my Whiteness, my education, and my class privilege—I have resources that keep me comfortable and able to disconnect from some of the more troubling or traumatic aspects of my sociopolitical world. An aim of PsySSR-Widener and myself personally is to hold us in the field accountable and to keep us engaged in social justice. Through regular self-reflection and learning along with political engagement, psychologists are well-positioned to create significant change for the better in our world, not only for ourselves and people like us, but everyone from the most marginalized among us to the most privileged.