The Healing Power of Community: Mutual Aid, AIDS, and Social Transformation in Psychology

The Healing Power of Community offers a diverse cross section of interdisciplinary and depth-psychological perspectives in support of using mutual aid approaches in all levels of group and community practice as a remedy for individualism and social and political divisions, centering social justice.

Written by three distinct voices who collaborated at the height of the AIDS crisis, the book begins with an autoethnographic study of Project Quest, an HIV/AIDS clinic established in 1989, before looking at how the lessons learnt from this clinic can be applied to our current global mental health climate. Filled with clinical and theoretical applications, chapters include content on what mutual aid communities are, rethinking professionalism and boundaries in a crisis, healing collective trauma, group psychotherapy, psychodrama, depth psychology, and how mental health professionals can support radical change of key structures in nonprofit clinics, public administration, private practice, and research. Arguing for their approach of radicalizing mental health and community-based practice today, the book examines how this can be achieved by moving beyond individual-level approaches, creating new frameworks to meet the mental health needs of our era in creative ways.

This book is designed to engage clinical social workers and mental health care clinicians working in community-based mental health, as well as those involved in community psychology, collective trauma and grief, HIV/AIDS advocacy, policy making, and political advocacy.

Lusijah Marx is a nurse, clinical psychologist, and psychedelic facilitator in Portland, OR. She co-founded the Quest Center for Integrative Health Care, a wellness-based healthcare nonprofit, and founded Radiance Integrative Health and Wellness.

Graham Harriman is a long-term survivor of HIV, a psychotherapist, and Chair of the CAEAR Coalition. Most recently he also served as the Director of the HIV Health and Human Services Planning Council of New York at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

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Robin McCoy Brooks is a Jungian analyst, nationally certified Trainer, Educator, and Practitioner of group psychotherapy, sociometry and psychodrama, and author of Psychoanalysis, Catastrophe & Social Change (2022), winner of the “best book” award by the International Association for Jungian Studies.