PSY408 Official Handouts

Table of Contents

Lesson 1 Lesson 2 Lesson 3 Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 Health Related Careers Lesson 7 The Function of Nervous System Lesson 8 The Function of Nervous System and Endocrine Glands Lesson 9 Digestive and Renal Systems Lesson 10 The Respiratory System Lesson 11 Blood Composition Lesson 12 Soldiers of the Immune System Lesson 13 The Phenomenon of Stress Lesson 14 Factors that Lead to Stressful Appraisals Lesson 15 Psychosocial Aspects of Stress Lesson 16 Sources of Stress Lesson 17 Measuring Stress Lesson 18 Psychosocial Factors That Can Modify the Impact of Stress on Health Lesson 19 How Stress Affects Health Lesson 20 Coping with Stress Lesson 21 Reducing the Potential for Stress Lesson 22 Stress Management Lesson 23 The Phenomenon of Pain: Its Nature and Types Lesson 24 The Physiology of Pain Perception Lesson 25 Assessing Pain Lesson 26 Dealing with Pain Lesson 27 Adjusting to Chronic Illnesses Lesson 28 The Coping Process in Patients of Chronic Illness Lesson 29 Impact of Different Chronic Conditions Lesson 30 Impact of Different Chronic Conditions Lesson 31 Psychosocial Interventions for People with Chronic Conditions Lesson 32 Coping with and Adapting to High-Mortality Illnesses Lesson 33 Coping with and Adapting to High-Mortality Illnesses Lesson 34 Coping with and Adapting to High-Mortality Illnesses Lesson 35 Coping with and Adapting to High-Mortality Illnesses Lesson 36 Psychosocial Interventions for Terminally Ill Patients Lesson 37 Health and Behavior Lesson 38 Secondary Prevention Lesson 39 The Health Belief Model Lesson 40 Nutrition and Health Lesson 41 Weight Control and Diet Lesson 42 Diet Myths Lesson 43 Exercise and Weight Control Lesson 44 Exercise and Weight Control Lesson 45 Role of Health Psychology LESSON 01 LESSON 01 LESSON 01 LESSON 01

Prologue

“Wide load” the boys shouted as they pressed themselves against the walls of the hallway at school. They were ‘making room for a very overweight girl named Sara to pass through. Lunch time in the cafeteria was even more degrading for Sara because when she sat down to eat; her schoolmates would stop eating, stare at her every move, and make pig noises. “Kids can be cruel.” her parents would say to console her. One of Sara’s aunts told her that she inherited a glandular problem, and you can’t do anything about it.” and another aunt said, “You’ll lose weight easily in a couple of years when you start getting interested in boys.” Is either aunt right?

Sara’s parents are concerned about her weight because they know that overweight people often have social problems and face special health risks, particularly for high blood pressure and heart disease. But her parents are not sure why she is so heavy or how to help her. Although her father is a bit overweight, her mother is very heavy; was heavy as a child, and did not lose weight when she became interested in boys. This could support the idea of an inherited cause of her being overweight. On the other hand, they know Sara eats a lot of fattening foods and gets very little exercise, a combination that often causes weight gains. As part of their effort to change these two behaviors, they encouraged her to join a recreation program, where she will be Involved in many physical activities.

This story about Sara illustrates important issues related to health. For instance, being overweight is associated with the development of specific health problems and may affect the individual’s social relations. Also, weight problems can result from a person’s inheritance and his or her behavior.

What is Health?

What is health? How do you know when you are healthy? To answer these questions, let’s first consider what illness is. We define a disease as a characteristic grouping of physical signs and symptoms; it is given a specific name and can often be traced to a specific causal agent. Illness, however, is a broader term that involves people’s beliefs about the state of their physical well-being and the resulting behaviors they engage in.

Illness beliefs may be the result of a specific disease or just the way we feel when we say we are ill (even when there is no evidence of a disease).

Illness is important because it is what motivates people to seek out a physician. A disease is what the physician recognizes as a specific disorder based on known signs and symptoms. Therefore, a physician is likely to define health as the absence of disease, while the average person might define health more broadly; as the absence of any ill feelings.

In both of these definitions, however, health is described in terms of what it is not—as the absence of disease or illness. We commonly think about health in terms of an absence of (1) Objective signs that the body is not functioning properly, such as measured high blood pressure, or (2) Subjective symptoms of disease or injury, such as pain or nausea. Dictionaries define health in this way, too. But there is a problem with this definition of health. Let’s see why. Consider Sara, the overweight girl in the opening story. You’ve surely heard people say. “It’s not healthy to be overweight,” Is Sara healthy? What about someone who feels fine but whose lungs are being damaged from smoking cigarettes or whose arteries are becoming clogged from eating foods which are high in saturated fats? These are all signs of improper body functioning. Are people with these signs healthy? We probably would say they are not “sick”—they are just less healthy than they would be without the unhealthful conditions.

This means health and sickness are not entirely separate concepts—they overlap. There are degrees of wellness and of illness. Medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky (1979, 1987) has suggested that we consider these concepts as ends of a continuum, noting that “We are all terminal cases. And we all are, so long as there is a breath of life in us, in some measure healthy”. He also proposed that we revise our focus, giving more attention to what enables people to stay well than to what causes people to become ill.

The Illness-wellness Continuum

In this way, health refers to a positive state of physical, mental, and social wellbeing—not simply the absence of injury or disease—that varies over time along a continuum. At the wellness end of the continuum, health is the dominant state. At the other end of the continuum, the dominant state is illness or injury, in which destructive processes produce characteristic signs, symptoms, or disabilities.

Health and Wellness Defined

In 1947, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined health as “the state of complete mental, physical, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease” (WHO, 1947). WHO’s definition was the first globally accepted conceptualization of health and stood the test of time for more than a decade. Although multifaceted, this definition of health was flawed, according to members of a new movement called holistic health. The holistic health movement came into being in the 1960s as an attempt to expand the view of health that WHO had spread.

One of the early pioneers in the field, Halbert Dunn (1962), believed that WHO’S vision of health characterized it as a static state. Rather than call health a state of well-being, Dunn preferred to view it as a continuum. Developing and maintaining a high level of health means moving toward high-level functioning along a continuum that starts with low-level wellbeing and ends with optimal functioning. Health is a conscious and deliberate approach to life and being, rather than something to be abdicated to doctors and the healthcare system. Optimal health is a result of your decisions and behavior.

In addition, Dunn recast the notion of wellbeing to revolve around how well a person functions. That is, he viewed functioning as evidence of well-being. Although people will have setbacks in their quest for optimal functioning, the direction in which their lives are moving becomes an important criterion for evaluating their wellbeing. In this movement, daily habits and behaviors, as well as overall lifestyle, assume primary importance.