Abstract
This article provides a new perspective on the special lecture at the 24th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Community Psychology. The COVID-19 pandemic has enormous effects on different aspects of daily life beyond medicine. These effects include discrimination against infected people, the increasing number of the unemployed, young suicide victims, child abuse, and so on. What are the roles and the mission of community psychologists in an era when “coexisting” with the coronavirus has become the “new normal”? This article discusses the above issue by returning to the basics. Yamamoto (1986) stated that community psychology should “explore new theories by inspecting basic ideas and changing these ideas to solve practical problems, develop new technical and strategic theories, make a commitment to reality, evaluate the results, and examine the results.” This article introduces the author’s recent research on COVID-19 and reviews academic values, attitudes, theories, and strategies of community psychology since its inception, and discusses future issues.
