Health Psychology: history, subdisciplines and objectives

Do you know what Health Psychology is? Perhaps you relate it to clinical psychology, although they are not the same. While clinical psychology is concerned with diagnosing and offering treatment to people who may have developed a psychological disorder, Health Psychology seeks to promote healthy habits of patients in a broad sense.

In addition, Health Psychology also aims to offer information about diseases (psychoeducation) and offer guidelines to prevent an illness and improve the state of health. Do you want to know more about her? Origins, objectives, subdisciplines that include…? Here we tell you!

Health Psychology: what is it?

Health Psychology was described by Matarazzo (1982) as a field that encompasses various contributions of psychology; It essentially includes education, science and profession, all of them applied to health and illness. However, there are more definitions for this discipline. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines it as an interdisciplinary field that applies the knowledge obtained through psychology to health and illness.

Specifically, it does so through health programs that are usually applied in primary care or in different medical units. Besides, one of its key objectives is health promotion; To this end, this discipline is interested in understanding how psychological, behavioral, social and cultural factors influence people’s physical health and illness.

Subdisciplines that include

What subdisciplines does this discipline of psychology include? Thielke et al. (2011) list four:

Clinical health psychology

Clinical health psychology applies scientific knowledge to clinical questions that may arise across the spectrum of health care. One of its great contributions is mental health prevention.. Clinical practice includes, but is not limited to: education, psychotherapy, and behavior modification techniques.

Public health psychology

This subdiscipline is oriented to the population. Its main objective is to investigate possible causal relationships between psychosocial and health factors at the population level.

Community Health Psychology

This subdiscipline of psychology, for its part, investigates what community factors influence health and well-being of the people who live in a community.

Critical health psychology

Finally, this last subdiscipline, a concept that may sound new, investigates the distribution of power and the impact of differences in that power on the experience of health and behavior.

Background

Before continuing to describe what this discipline of psychology consists of, We are going to know its origins in a very summary way. Specifically, we find the following key antecedents in its emergence as an independent discipline, according to Johnson, Weinman and Chater (2011). These are:

The emergence of Psychophysiology and Psychoneuroimmunology. The addition of behavioral science and communication skills in the training of Medicine. The obtaining of epidemiological data that relate behavior to health. The development of some disciplines, such as: Psychosomatic Medicine and Behavioral Medicine.

As for Psychosomatic Medicine and Behavioral Medicine, these focus on addressing physical illness from various psychological intervention techniques. They differ, however, in that Psychosomatic Medicine has a psychodynamic origin and behavioral medicine comes from behaviorism.

Goals

What is health psychology responsible for? What are your objectives? Let’s know its four fundamental objectives:

Health promotion

The fundamental objective of health psychology is its promotion. It does this through techniques that enhance patient adherence to medical treatments.; In addition, techniques that improve the relationship between the doctor or professional and the patient are also encouraged.

In fact, these two variables (adherence to treatment and professional-patient relationship) are worked on because it has been observed how important they are in the effectiveness of medical treatments.

Disease prevention and treatment

The prevention of the disease, as well as its treatment, are also clear objectives in this discipline. In this sense, to achieve them, the teaching healthy lifestyle habits (such as quitting smoking, reducing the amount of alcohol consumed on a daily basis, etc.).

This work is also carried out thanks to the design of disease prevention campaigns. On the other hand, regarding the treatment of diseases, Health Psychology also seeks to improve the quality of life of chronic patients, those with terminal illnesses, etc.

Identification of correlates

Another objective of Health Psychology is the identification of the etiological and diagnostic correlates of diseases. That is to say, investigates what factors influence their appearance and course. To achieve this, this discipline draws on the knowledge of epidemiology and Basic Psychology, among others.

Improvement of the health system

Finally, it also aims to improve the public health system. As? Through recommendations to professionals, health programs, etc. For example, Health psychologists can advise doctors on the best ways to communicate with their patients (The British Psychological Society2011).

Synthesis of Health Psychology

As we have seen, Health Psychology focuses on promoting health, preventing illness and treating it when it appears.. It has a clearly psychoeducational component, as well as a practical and political one, because it seeks to establish health programs at the community level that improve people’s quality of life.

It has moved away from the classic approach of other disciplines (such as medicine or clinical psychology) who was very focused on the disease, to also bet on health itself. It draws on various disciplines, which makes it a fairly complete discipline.

You might be interested…