Biopsychosocial Basics Flashcards
Four parts to health psychology:
- Health promotion and maintenance
- Prevention and treatment of illness
- Etiology and correlates of health, illness, and dysfunction
- Impact of health professionals on people’s behaviour
Describe and define health psychology.
A field within psychology devoted to understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why they become ill, and how they respond when they do get ill.
Definition of health (World Health Organization):
Complete state of physical, mental, and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Definition of etiology:
Origins or causes of an illness.
Three treatment-related behaviours:
- Screening behaviours
- Care-seeking behaviours
- Maintenance and adherence behaviours
Psychoanalytic contributions:
Freud and conversion hysteria:
- patient converts conflict into a symptom via the voluntary nervous system and then becomes relatively free of the anxiety caused by the conflict
Psychosomatic medicine:
Dunbar and Alexander:
- specific illnesses are produced by internal conflicts, linked to patterns with types of personality
Behavioural medicine:
Developed in part to address need for testable hypothesis for psychosomatic medicine. Demonstrates connection between body and mind previously suggested by psychosomatic medicine.
The Biopsychosocial Model:
Health and illness are consequence of the interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors.
The Biomedical Model:
All illness can be explained on basis of aberrant somatic processes and assumes that psychological and social processes are independent of disease process.
- reductionistic, single-factor model of illness, body-mind dualism
Reductionist model (element of biomedical model):
Reduces illness to low-level processes.
Single-factor model of illness (biomedical):
Explains illness in terms of biological malfunction rather than looking towards other factors that may contribute to development of the illness.
Advantages of Biopsychosocial Model of Health:
- biological, psychological and social factors are all-important determinants of health and illness
- both macrolevel and microlevel processes interact
- health and illness caused by multiple factors and produce multiple effects
Systems theory:
All levels of organization in any entity are linked to each other hierarchically and that change in any one level will effect change in all other levels.
Clinical implications of biopsychosocial model:
- process of diagnosis should always consider the interacting role of biological, psychological and social factors
- recommendations for treatment must also examine three factors
- makes explicit the significance of the relationship between patient and practitioner
Why is health psychology needed?
- increase in chronic or lifestyle illnesses
- changing perspective on definition of health
- increasing burden of health care expenditures
Changing pattern of illness:
Until 20th century, acute disorders were major causes of illness and death; now chronic illnesses are main contributors to disability and death especially in industrialized countries.
Definition of acute disorders:
short-term medical illness, usually amenable to cure
Definition of chronic illnesses:
slowly developing diseases with which people live with for a long time; helped create presence of health psychology: psychological and social factors are implicated as causes; psychological issues arise in connection with chronic illnesses
Role of epidemiology:
changing patterns of illness; morbidity and mortality
Definition of epidemiology:
study of frequency, distribution, and causes of infectious and non-infectious disease in a population; based on investigation of physical environment
Definition of morbidity:
refers to number of cases of a disease that exist at some given point; expressed as number of new cases (INCIDENCE) or as total number of existing cases (PREVALENCE)
Definition of mortality:
refers to number of deaths due to a particular cause
The Lalonde Report:
changing perspective on health and health care with framework for health resting on four cornerstones: human biology, environment, lifestyle, and health care organization
Public health promotion model:
aimed at improving health of individuals and communities; highlighting need for social policy changes and action; shares many values of biopsychosocial model
Health psychology’s demonstrated contributions:
- develop variety of short-term behavioural interventions to address variety of health-related problems
- guide interventions to change, promote and maintain people’s health
Temporal self-regulation theory:
understanding individual health-related behaviours depends on how this health behaviour is framed over time
Compensatory health beliefs:
understanding the role of compensatory beliefs for explaining why people fail to bring the intention-behaviour gap in context of tempting unhealthy alternative choices
Definition of health behaviours:
modifiable risk factors that are central to understanding how health psychology can encourage useful goals
Treatment-related behaviours:
Important set of behaviours that can help reduce risks for development of illness as well as help people maintain health and manage disease
The different models of health:
- biopsychosocial model (optimum health and wellness)
- biomedical model (absence of disease)
- public health model
Biomedical model of health:
dualistic (mind and body separate), mechanistic (body is a machine), and reductionistic (reduced to simplest components)
Biopsychosocial model of health:
hierarchy of levels, interconnected, no dualism or reductionism; part of a social system
What is health psychology?
understanding psychological influences on how people stay healthy, why they become ill, and how they respond when they do get ill (two-way psychological effects of illness)
How did health psychology emerge?
changing patterns of illness, health care service issues… etc.
