Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 41

For the most part, in Western cultures at least, when we talk about health we are actually talking about negative health experience or ‘ill-health’ rather than more positive aspects of health. This has its roots in the medical model of health. Salutogenesis turns this idea around. Salutogenesis is concerned with what creates health and ‘what factors support health’ (Svalastog et al., 2017: 432). Antonovsky was the instigator of this idea and he has challenged the ‘pathogenic’ nature of the medical model including its fixation on the elimination of disease constituting ‘health’. Antonovsky (1996) argues that the focus should be on ‘symptoms of wellness’ rather than causes of disease and at-risk groups and that, given that we are ‘organisms’ we should accept that we will, at time, have things ‘wrong’ with us. The suggestion is, therefore, that ‘none of us can be categorized as being either healthy or diseased, (instead) we are all located somewhere along a continuum’ (Sidell, 2010: 27).