Health Psychology: Nature and Scope

Health psychology is a branch of psychology, under which not only attention is paid to the health of an individual, but by going beyond the individual level, working among families, communities and the public, the health of the entire society and social community is taken care of. Health psychology helps in knowing and understanding the health-related problems prevalent in the society and in diagnosing them. Under health problems, how does psychology influence the maintenance of health? Like why do people fall ill? Or how do people fall ill? How do people react when they get sick? Or why react in a particular way? Why do some people become disease free after receiving treatment, while some people do not become disease free despite receiving treatment? Why is medicine not effective on those people?

In this way, health psychology studies all these problems and helps the people of the society to become free from diseases. For example, why does a person drink alcohol? How did he start taking it? Now how far does he go? Why doesn't he want to stop consuming it? Or why is he not able to leave? Why is the medicine not affecting him? By solving these questions, health psychology helps in liberating a person from alcohol addiction.

Definitions:

According to American psychologists, "Health psychology is a set of specific educational, scientific and professional elements of the subject of psychology, which includes the prevention and treatment of disease, disease and related factors to promote health and maintain health. To identify scientific and diagnostic correlates of dysfunction and to analyse and improve health care institutions and health related policy.”

According to Marks, Murray and others, "Health psychology is an interdisciplinary field that uses psychological knowledge and technology for health, illness and health care."

 

Areas/ Fields/ Scope of psychology

The field of health psychology includes all those areas and problematic situations which are related to a person's health. The main focus of the field of health psychology is the health of the individual. We can briefly describe its areas as follows:

1.   

Psychological impact on health-Health psychology tries to know how psychology affects a person's health. What are the psychological reasons behind a person becoming sick and what are the psychological reasons behind his not being free from the disease.

2. Mental condition of the patient: The work of health psychology is not only to know how psychology affects the health of a person, but also tries to know what is the mental condition of the patient. What kind of mood is he going through and how does he cope with the disease?

3. Health Promotion: Trying to provide health promotion to a person to free him from disease is also the field of health psychology because in the absence of encouragement, the patient's ability to fight the disease reduces and he continues to suffers from the disease for a long time.

4. Disease diagnosis-The work area of health psychology is also to diagnose diseases. It is also important to know which disease the patient is actually suffering from and what is its root cause, due to which sometimes the disease does not appear in its actual form but appears in a modified form, the diagnosis of which is possible only through health psychology.

5. Treatment of disease - The work of health psychology is not only to diagnose the disease, but also to pave the way for appropriate treatment to free the person from that disease and at the same time, health psychology helps the people of the society to understand the disease and the ways to prevent it.

6. Analysis of disease factors - The work area of health psychology is also to analyse the factors of disease. It collects knowledge of all the elements that are responsible for the disease; like, what is the root cause of the disease, what is the physical capacity of the patient, analysing the factors or elements related to the disease and trying to see the correlation between them, which makes it easier for the patient to get rid of the disease.

7. Health Welfare Programme- Health psychology organizes health welfare programs from time to time for the health welfare of the people living in the society. It also tries to improve the programs run by health welfare institutions, so that these institutions can provide better services and facilities.

8. Health related policy making - The scope of work of health psychology is not limited only to a person's disease and its prevention and treatment, but it also aims to remove the health related deficiencies prevalent in the society and create health welfare related policies so that the entire society can become disease free or it can become aware of the disease when it occurs.