Psychotherapy and Politics International: Scopus, Scope, Submission & Journal Selection Guide

Quick Answer: What Is Psychotherapy and Politics International?

Psychotherapy and Politics International is an international journal focused on the political dimensions of psychotherapy and the psychotherapeutic dimensions of political life. It publishes work that connects clinical, social, cultural, ideological, institutional, and political questions rather than treating psychotherapy as isolated from power and society.

The journal was previously published by Wiley and moved from Wiley after 2021. BAATN later took ownership, while the journal is currently hosted on the AUT OJS platform. Its 2026 announcement says it is now seeking a new sponsor or sponsors. The current official editorial team lists Karen Minikin, David Pavón-Cuéllar, Ian Parker, and Keith Tudor.

Researchers considering submission should first assess whether their paper makes a substantive connection between psychotherapy and politics, then confirm the latest author instructions, indexing status, issue plans, and editorial arrangements. Fit is likely to depend more on the strength of that psychopolitical connection than on whether a paper belongs to a single conventional psychology subfield.

Key Takeaways

• Journal identity: Psychotherapy and Politics International (PPI), print ISSN 1476-9263 and online ISSN 1556-9195.
• Scopus: the supplied source record is Scopus Source ID 19900191418; the former Wiley journal page also lists Scopus indexing.
• Scope: psychotherapy, politics, power, injustice, inequality, oppression, resistance, and radical or critical psychotherapeutic perspectives.
• Peer review: double-blind review; the official journal page states that each peer-reviewed paper is reviewed by two reviewers selected by the issue editor.
• Open access and fees: all content is open access; the journal states that it charges no submission, publication, or access fees.
• Author format: APA 7 referencing, suggested maximum 7,000 words, title page plus anonymised main text, and up to six keywords.
• Current transition: an April 2026 notice says the journal is seeking new sponsorship and plans two issues per year during the transition period.

Journal Information at a Glance

What This Page Covers

• journal identity, publishing history, ISSNs, and current hosting context
• aims, scope, subject themes, and recent issue topics
• Scopus and other indexing information with metric cautions
• article categories and the types of contributions visible in recent issues
• author guidelines, manuscript format, and submission workflow
• peer review, open access, copyright, and fees
• publication ethics and research-integrity expectations
• practical journal-fit and publication-readiness checks
• ethical ways Contentxprtz can support manuscript preparation

Methodology and Sources

This profile was prepared from the journal's current official OJS pages, its current editorial and submission pages, BAATN's journal information, the former Wiley journal page for historical publishing and indexing context, ISSN records, and the supplied Scopus Source ID. Current journal pages were given priority when older and newer information differed.

Journal sponsorship, frequency, editorial teams, indexing coverage, and citation metrics are time-sensitive. The journal's April 2026 notice is especially important because it describes an active search for a new sponsor or home. Authors should therefore reconfirm key facts immediately before submission.

• Official journal homepage
• Official aims, scope, open-access and peer-review information
• Official submissions and author guidelines
• Official editorial team
• April 2026 journal notice
• BAATN information on Psychotherapy and Politics International
• Scopus source profile
• Former Wiley journal archive

What Is Psychotherapy and Politics International?

PPI occupies a distinctive space between psychotherapy, psychology, political thought, social theory, cultural critique, and applied therapeutic practice. The journal is not simply about politics as an external topic discussed by therapists. Its central premise is that psychotherapy operates within social and political relations, and that concepts developed in psychotherapy can also illuminate political problems.

The archive illustrates this breadth. Past and recent issues have addressed indigeneity, global crises and online therapy, transactional analysis and politics, therapists' lived experience, war and refugees, Palestine, African diaspora experiences, body politics, psychopolitical responses to neoliberalism, trauma, racism, gender and sexuality, and social responsibility. This history makes the journal especially relevant to authors whose work deliberately crosses clinical and societal levels.

For a researcher, the practical implication is that a manuscript should make its political dimension analytically meaningful. A conventional clinical paper that merely mentions social context may not automatically fit. Conversely, a political-theory paper with no credible psychotherapy or psychotherapeutic connection may also be weakly aligned.

Journal Aims and Scope

The official scope says the journal explores connections and interactions between politics and psychotherapy in both theory and practice. It is interested in applying psychotherapeutic thinking to political problems and applying political concepts and values within psychotherapy.

The current journal statement gives particular visibility to radical psychotherapy and to lived experiences of injustice, inequality, and domination. It welcomes contributions informed by experiences of oppression and resistance, including anti-racist, queer, feminist, indigenous, decolonial, and radical disability perspectives. The journal also describes an explicit political position regarding Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israeli state institutions while stating that this does not compromise openness to differing political positions.

Research themes that appear strongly aligned

• power, ideology, authority, institutions, and psychotherapy
• racism, colonialism, decolonisation, indigeneity, and therapeutic practice
• gender, sexuality, queer experience, and politics in or around psychotherapy
• war, displacement, refugees, collective trauma, and psychopolitical responses
• political oppression, resistance, activism, and emotional or relational life
• neoliberalism, capitalism, social class, labour, and psychological subjectivity
• critical, radical, relational, psychoanalytic, humanistic, body-based, and other psychotherapeutic approaches when connected to political questions
• ethical and institutional power in counselling and psychotherapy
• culturally situated or community-based psychotherapy and mental-health practice

Possible fit concerns

As an editorial interpretation rather than an official exclusion list, manuscripts may be less suitable when they treat psychotherapy as context-free, address a generic mental-health outcome without a political analysis, or offer political commentary without a meaningful psychotherapeutic framework. Authors should compare their topic and method with several recent PPI articles before deciding that the broad wording of the scope guarantees fit.

What Are the Journal's Practical Scholarly Objectives?

The journal's published scope suggests several practical objectives: to make political structures visible within therapeutic theory and practice; to use psychotherapy as a lens for understanding social and political problems; to create space for critical, radical, decolonial and justice-oriented scholarship; and to connect subjective experience with wider systems of power.

PPI also appears to value dialogue across traditions rather than limiting itself to one therapeutic school. This makes the journal potentially attractive to interdisciplinary researchers, but it raises the bar for conceptual clarity: authors should explain both the psychotherapeutic framework and the political problem rather than assuming readers share one disciplinary vocabulary.

Is Psychotherapy and Politics International Indexed in Scopus?

Yes, the supplied source record identifies Psychotherapy and Politics International as Scopus Source ID 19900191418, and the Wiley journal information page lists Scopus in its abstracting and indexing information. The same Wiley page lists the Emerging Sources Citation Index (Clarivate) and EBSCO Academic Search services.

Researchers should also distinguish between a journal being indexed and a specific article being indexed. Inclusion rules, coverage dates, and document processing can affect whether an individual publication appears in a database.

Recent Issues and What They Reveal About Journal Fit

The 2025 archive offers useful evidence about the journal's active interests. Volume 23 included a special issue on African diaspora voices transforming counselling and psychotherapy, another special issue on Palestine, and regular issues. Articles in the African diaspora issue addressed Sankofa and Ubuntu, Black therapist identity and belonging, transnational family practices, arts-based work with Black university students experiencing anxiety or depression, and therapy for queer communities under political oppression in Ghana.

For prospective authors, these examples show that PPI can accommodate empirical qualitative work, reflective case studies, theoretically informed analysis, and culturally situated therapeutic research when the political dimension is central. Authors should use recent issues as a fit test rather than relying only on a broad keyword match.

What Types of Articles and Contributions Does the Journal Publish?

The current and archived issues show several visible contribution categories. These include peer-reviewed articles, editorials and guest editorials, reviews, interviews, commentaries, and Notes from the Front Line. BAATN also invites contributions such as articles or research papers, reviews of talks or publications, notes from the front line, art, and poetry.

Not every contribution type necessarily follows the same review pathway. The official peer-review statement specifically describes peer-reviewed content and submitted articles going through double-blind review. Authors proposing non-standard formats should contact the journal or check the relevant section instructions rather than assuming the 7,000-word research-article guidance applies identically to every contribution.

Who Should Consider Submitting?

PPI may be a strong candidate for psychotherapists, counsellors, psychologists, psychoanalytic or psychosocial researchers, critical mental-health scholars, social theorists, interdisciplinary academics, and practitioner-researchers whose work directly examines the politics of therapeutic life or the psychotherapeutic dimensions of political experience.

Students and PhD scholars should also check their institution's journal requirements. Being relevant to a thesis topic does not automatically mean that a journal meets a university's rules concerning database coverage, quartile, impact metrics, or publication date.

Manuscript and Author Guidelines

According to the current official submission page, authors should use APA 7 referencing, translate non-English terms and titles, define abbreviations when first used, avoid footnotes, and generally keep the manuscript to a suggested maximum of 7,000 words.

The journal asks for two documents. The title page should contain the title, a short running title, author names and affiliations, ORCID iDs, abstract, up to six keywords, and corresponding-author contact details. The anonymised main text should contain the title, abstract, keywords, main text, and references.

How to Submit a Manuscript

Submissions are made through the journal's OJS system. Authors must register or log in and complete the submission process. The preparation checklist states that a manuscript should not have been previously published or be under consideration elsewhere unless an explanation has been provided to the editor.

1. Read the current author guidelines and checklist.
2. Confirm that the manuscript's psychopolitical contribution fits recent PPI issues.
3. Prepare the title page and anonymised manuscript separately.
4. Apply APA 7 consistently and define abbreviations.
5. Check permissions for images or illustrations.
6. Prepare optional reviewer suggestions if appropriate.
7. Register or log in to the OJS submission system and follow the metadata and file-upload steps.
8. Save the submitted version, confirmation email, and any correspondence for your records.

Peer-Review Process and Publication Timeline

The official journal page states that peer-reviewed content and submitted articles use a double-blind review process. Each paper is reviewed by two reviewers selected by the issue editor, and editors make final acceptance and revision decisions based on reviewer recommendations.

BAATN's journal information page states that there is a three-month lead time for peer review and copy editing. Authors should treat this as published process guidance, not as a guaranteed decision or publication deadline. Reviewer availability, revision rounds, issue scheduling, sponsorship, and editorial workload can all affect actual timing.

The journal does not publicly state an acceptance rate on the official pages reviewed. Any acceptance-rate percentage found on a third-party site should therefore be treated cautiously unless the journal itself confirms it.

Open Access, Copyright, and Publication Fees

PPI states that it provides open access to all journal content. Articles from 2022 onward are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Earlier articles are freely available to read and download but are not necessarily covered by a Creative Commons licence unless explicitly stated on the article page.

The journal states that it charges no fees for submission, publication, or access. This is effectively a fee-free open-access model for authors under the current policy. Authors should nevertheless reconfirm the policy before submission because sponsorship arrangements are currently in transition.

PPI describes its publishing rights as non-exclusive and says authors retain copyright. Authors may place published papers in institutional repositories and may republish their work elsewhere if the original PPI publication is acknowledged. Authors are responsible for permissions covering images and illustrations.

Publication Ethics and Research Integrity

The journal site provides a dedicated publication-ethics and publication-malpractice section. At a minimum, authors should approach submission with standard scholarly-integrity principles: originality, accurate citation, appropriate authorship, disclosure of conflicts and funding, avoidance of simultaneous submission, protection of research participants where applicable, and transparent reporting of methods and evidence.

For politically sensitive or community-based work, ethical readiness also includes careful representation. Researchers should avoid presenting communities primarily through deficit narratives, overgeneralising from small or situated samples, or using clinical concepts to obscure structural forms of harm. Where research involves vulnerable participants, trauma, conflict, marginalised identities, or practitioner-client relationships, institutional ethics approval and informed-consent requirements should be handled explicitly where applicable.

How to Decide Whether PPI Fits Your Manuscript

Practical Manuscript-Fit Examples

Example 1: Decolonising psychotherapy training

A qualitative study of how racialised trainee therapists experience Eurocentric psychotherapy curricula could fit if it links lived experience to institutional power, therapeutic theory, and concrete implications for training.

Example 2: Online therapy under political repression

A reflective or empirical paper examining how therapists create safety for queer clients in a hostile legal or political environment may align strongly, particularly when it analyses both therapeutic process and political conditions.

Example 3: Collective trauma after conflict

A paper that examines war-related trauma through both psychotherapeutic and political frameworks could fit, especially if it avoids reducing collective or structural violence to individual symptoms alone.

Example 4: Standard treatment-outcome trial

A conventional randomised trial comparing two therapies for depression may be weakly aligned if it contains no meaningful political analysis. A stronger PPI version would need a genuine question about power, social conditions, access, institutions, inequality, or political subjectivity rather than a decorative contextual paragraph.

Example 5: Political discourse without psychotherapy

An essay on electoral ideology with no therapeutic, psychoanalytic, psychosocial, or psychopolitical framework may also be outside the journal's central remit. The title alone should not be used to infer that all political psychology belongs within scope.

Publication-Readiness Checklist Before Submission

• Confirm the journal's current sponsor/home, issue plan, and submission availability.
• Open the live Scopus record if database indexing is important to your institution.
• Compare the manuscript with at least three to five recent PPI papers.
• Make the psychotherapy-politics connection explicit in the title, abstract, introduction, and discussion.
• State the article's contribution in one or two precise sentences.
• Use APA 7 consistently and verify every citation against the original source.
• Keep within the suggested 7,000-word limit unless the editor approves otherwise.
• Prepare the title page and anonymised manuscript as separate files.
• Remove author-identifying information from the blind-review file.
• Translate non-English terms and titles and define abbreviations on first use.
• Check tables, figures, permissions, accessibility, and captions.
• Review ethics approval, consent, confidentiality, and conflict-of-interest disclosures where relevant.
• Proofread for clarity without flattening culturally or politically significant terminology.
• Prepare an accurate cover note or submission metadata rather than making claims about guaranteed fit.

How Contentxprtz Can Support Publication Readiness

Contentxprtz can support authors preparing a manuscript for PPI through academic editing, language polishing, proofreading, journal-format checking, citation and reference consistency, anonymisation review, abstract refinement, manuscript assessment, and reviewer-response editing. For interdisciplinary manuscripts, editing can also help make the relationship between therapeutic concepts and political analysis clearer to readers from different backgrounds.

Support should remain ethical and author-led. Contentxprtz does not control editorial decisions, peer review, indexing, citation outcomes, or acceptance. The author remains responsible for the research, evidence, interpretation, authorship, disclosures, and final submission.

Summary

Psychotherapy and Politics International is a specialist open-access journal for scholarship that meaningfully connects psychotherapy with politics, power, inequality, oppression, resistance, culture, institutions, and social change. The supplied journal record identifies Scopus Source ID 19900191418, while the former Wiley indexing page also lists Scopus and ESCI. The current journal site states that peer-reviewed submissions use double-blind review by two reviewers, that authors retain copyright, and that there are no submission or publication fees.

For authors, the most important selection question is not simply whether a paper concerns psychotherapy or politics, but whether it contributes to the relationship between them in a way that fits PPI's current critical and international conversation. Before submitting, confirm the live Scopus record, current sponsorship/home, current issue plan, and current author instructions.

Conclusion

Psychotherapy and Politics International may suit researchers whose work makes a serious, explicit connection between therapeutic life and political power, culture, inequality, resistance, institutions, or social change. Its open-access model, critical scope, and international editorial conversation make it distinctive, but journal fit should still be demonstrated through recent literature and a clearly stated contribution.

Before submission, confirm the current OJS instructions, live indexing record, sponsorship position, and issue schedule. Then prepare the manuscript carefully for anonymised double-blind review, APA 7 referencing, and the journal's interdisciplinary readership. Professional editing or publication-readiness support can help improve presentation, but it cannot and should not be presented as a route to guaranteed acceptance.