Somewhere to Stand
Black practitioners in Britain often work alone.
UKABPsi is where that changes.
The San Francisco Genesis
Black psychologists broke away from Eurocentric paradigms during the Civil Rights Movement to establish ABPsi as an autonomous body. The organization was created to dismantle pathologizing deficit models and prioritize the psychological liberation of African-heritage populations.
Institutionalizing African-Centered Scholarship
ABPsi established its national headquarters in Washington, D.C., and launched the seminal Journal of Black Psychology. This milestone created a peer-reviewed academic sanctuary dedicated to centering African worldviews (Utamawazo) and redefining global mental health standards.
Crossing the Atlantic – The UK Chapter Launch
UKABPsi expanded the movement into the United Kingdom to build an institutional home for Black British practitioners and students facing professional isolation. Guided by Jegnas (elders and cultural stewards), the chapter works to decolonize local mental health systems and weave ancestral wisdom into clinical practice.
Responding to Crisis with Community Healing
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and global racial reckoning, UKABPsi rapidly deployed culturally grounded community interventions. Using spaces like Emotional Emancipation Circles and Sawubona Healing Circles, the organization established a vital bridge between grassroots healing and institutional policy reform.
Who We Are
We are Black psychologists, therapists and healers who refuse to practise as though our people began in someone else's textbook.
African-centred psychology puts African realities, cultures and ways of knowing at the centre of the work — not as context, but as the ground we stand on.
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UKABPsi is where that work is held in common.
The Moment You Noticed
Most Black practitioners can name it. A diagnostic category that did not fit the family sitting in front of them. A reading list where our communities appeared mainly as risk factors. Mainstream psychology in Britain still rests on Eurocentric paradigms and assessment tools built elsewhere, for other purposes, and it reads African-heritage lives through a deficit lens — counting what is absent rather than what is carried.
Healing on Our Own Terms
Liberation asks more of us than an invitation into that room. It asks that we return to our natural order. African-centred psychology begins from African ways of knowing and thinking — Utamawazo — and understands healing as the restoration of right relationship: to ancestry, to community, to self. There is scholarship behind this, and a practice tradition older than the discipline that overlooked it.
A Home for the Work
But scholarship needs somewhere to live. Without an autonomous institutional base, Black practitioners risk delivering Eurocentric psychology with a different-coloured face, holding that contradiction alone until isolation hardens into burnout. UKABPsi exists to hold the work in common — a place to speak plainly about what the wider system asks of us, to think alongside colleagues who do not need the context explained, and to build research-grounded practice rooted in our own traditions. If you are of the people and for the people, stand with a collective of warrior-healers.
UK Executive Committee Officers
Clancy Williams
Chapter President
Dr. Michele Perry-Springer
Chapter Secretary
Anaclete Douglas
Chapter Treasurer
Clan Leaders
Rock Clan
Dr. Michele Perry-Springer
Fyah Clan
Tegha
Earth Clan
Nyela
Nature Clan
Khembé
Water Clan
Illuminate the African Spirit
The Association of Black psychologists (ABPsi) USA has now become international. UK Abpsi is now an affiliate member of the USA National body. We are overjoyed to be able to share the knowledge and experience of our elders, brothers and sisters.
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Our Objectives are to advance African Psychology, to address significant problems affecting the Black community, empowerment of the African Character, and enlivenment and illumination of the African Spirit.
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The UK ABPsi chapter was officially launched on March 17th 2018. This heralded the start of a series of black psychology workshops-presentations.​
