From ‘root shock’ to ‘Main Street’: For a biopsychosocial urban psychology

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.