What is Health Psychology?
Health psychology is the field within psychology. It dedicated to understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, when they become ill, and how they respond when they do get ill. Fundamental to research and practice in health psychology is the definition of health. In 1948, the World Health Organization defined health as “a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1948). Rather than describing health as the absence of illness, health is recognized to be an achievement involving balance among physical, mental, and social well-being.
Health psychology is concerned with all respect of health and illness across the life span (Maddux, Roberts, Sledden, and Wright, 1986). It also focus on health promotion and maintenance, including such issues as how to promote regular exercise, how to design media campaign to avoid tobacco. We all know that tobacco inside cigarette causes a lot of diseases, especially cancer.
Health psychologists also study the psychological aspect of the prevention and treatment of illness, such as how to manage stress effectively so that it will not adversely affect their health, how to recover their illness more successfully.
Health psychologists also focus on the etiology and correlates of health, illness, and dysfunction. Etiology means the cause, set of causes, and health psychologists are especially interested in the behavioral and social factors that contribute to health or illness and dysfunction. Such factors can include health habit such as smoking, exercise, consuming junk food.
Finally, health psychologists analyze and attempt to improve the health care system and the formulation of health policy.
Gathering it all together, health psychology represents the educational, scientific, and professional contributions of psychology to the promotion and maintenance of health; the prevention and treatment of illness; the identification of the causes and correlates of health, illness, and related dysfunction; the improvement of the health care system, and health policy formation (Matarazzo, 1980)
For me, it is necessary to know. By acknowledging it—in the smallest part, we able to know how much our psychological condition can influence our health, so that we can stay healthy.