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From ‘root shock’ to ‘Main Street’: For a biopsychosocial urban psychology
Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal,
13
(3),
251-256
(2020)
Abstract
This paper reflects upon a lifetime of scholarship and activism which has sought to increase the urban policy literacy of psychiatrists and the psychiatric literacy of urban policy makers. She underscores the generative importance in her thinking of a unique intellectual ‘progressive’ niche-milieu which emerged in US psychiatry in the late 1970s and early 1980s and in particular the insights provided by George Engel’s Biopsychosocial Model; charts her research on forms of urban development in US cities that have left as their legacy mass displacement and gentrification, which has wounded disproportionally poorer and ethnic communities and caused ‘root shock’; and outlines the author’s hopes for a new tradition of Biopsychosocial informed urban regeneration and renewal which seeks to nurture and thicken communities and pro-social spaces so as to protect, repair and heal the mental health of those hitherto construed as ‘casualties of progress’. This paper calls attention to the literal and figurative importance of the idea of the ‘Main Street’ in projects of healing.
Keywords: George Engel; biopsychosocial model; American Psychiatric Association; Jeanne Spurlock; serial forced displacement
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Mindy Thompson Fullilove MD, LFAPA, Hon AIA, is Professor of Urban Policy and Health at The New School in New York. Prior to joining The New School in 2016, Mindy worked for 26 years as a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute and was a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Public Health at Columbia University. She is author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It and Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities.
