CPUK statement of support and solidarity with the people of Gaza (2009).

Community Psychologists in the UK (CPUK) extend their support for and solidarity to the people of Gaza. We are calling upon the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps, beginning with immediate boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the state of Israel, to oblige Israel's political administration to: abide by international law; dismantle its apartheid regime spanning both the occupied territories and Israel; immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza; end the occupation of the West Bank; abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders; and commit to pursuing a long-lasting, just peace.

CPUK denounces as war crimes and crimes against humanity the disproportionality of Israel's attacks on Gaza, which includes the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children. The Israeli Defense Force deliberately: targets hospitals, civilian shelters and prevents medical aid reaching the injured and medical supplies and equipment from entering the Gaza Strip; uses white phosphorous munitions in civilian areas; and destroys Gaza's infrastructure of roads, water supplies, sanitation, food production, food distribution, food security, electricity, social services, education services, health services, law and order, housing, environmental services, and broader social support structures. These actions suggest the Israeli political administration's has genocidal intentions towards the people of Palestine.

The massacre of civilians in Gaza is the latest phase of a war that successive governments of Israel (supported by the USA and Britain) have been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force capable of resisting Israel's ongoing appropriation of Palestinian land and resources. CPUK believes that for the sake of justice and global peace, th Israeli State must not be allowed to achieve this. Our belief in the right of the Palestinians to democratic self-determination, and to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, obligates us to take the side of the people of Gaza and the West Bank and to side against Israel.

Statement issued by CPUK (Community Psychology UK)
Monday 19th January 2009

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The Birmingham Manifesto:  Community Psychology in a Global Context.  (April 2007)

Press Release from The UK Community Psychology Network on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

For immediate release                    16 October 2007

Changing politicians' minds about changing our minds?

"Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and associated approaches are comprehensively problematic.  Primary prevention is the only way to substantially reduce socially, economically and materially caused distress.  To be effective primary prevention must involve social rather than cognitive change.  Reducing income inequality in our society would be one of the most effective ways to reduce psychological distress and ill health”, says the UK Community Psychology Network.

Read the full press release

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York Statement on Poverty - September 2007

"As community and critical psychologists we believe that psychologists have a fundamental responsibility to join with others to end both poverty and societal inequality independent of absolute wealth, which we believe are personally, collectively and socially destructive.

We believe mainstream psychology to be complicit with the prevailing psychologically toxic neo-liberal economic order and believe psychology has allowed itself to be used to hide systemic effects of poverty and inequality and instead position poverty as a consequence of individual psychological dysfunction.

 We call for the radical transformation of psychology so that it has the resources necessary to expose the personally, collectively and socially destructive effects of poverty and inequality and the proactive deployment, with allies, of this transformed psychology to end poverty and societal inequality and the exploitation, exclusion, oppression, distress and illness which result from them."

…on behalf of the UK community psychology network

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