Psychopolitical literacy for wellness and justice

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Abstract
Wellness and justice have attracted recent attention in psychology. Both within our discipline and within society at large, more needs to be done to elucidate the link between the two while taking into account the role of power and context. We suggest that wellness is achieved by the balanced and synergistic satisfaction of personal, relational, and collective needs, which, in turn, are dependent on how much justice people experience in each domain. We explore how affective, polarized, acquired, situated, and invested cultural distortions misrepresent the two realms as isolated from each other. To help counter these negative outcomes, we propose psychopolitical literacy and psychopolitical validity. The more youth are exposed to these antidotes, the better equipped they will be to resist cultural distortions and enhance both wellness and justice. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comm Psychol 35: 793–805, 2007.