Читать книгу Contemporary Health Studies - Louise Warwick-Booth - Страница 44

Different perspectives offer different contributions to our understanding of health. In the first instance let’s consider philosophical perspectives about health. Seedhouse (2001) argues that it is important to consider philosophy when trying to answer the question ‘what is health?’, since philosophy should be employed where competing and conflicting ideas about phenomena exist – health is a very good example of this. Another perspective is offered by psychology. Stephens (2008: 19) argues that psychology views health as ‘a matter for individual minds’. Mainstream approaches to health in psychology that focus on the individual in terms of cognitive processes and behaviour are closely aligned to the individualistic medical model of health, and the idea of the body as a machine (Stephens, 2008), which challenges more holistic ideas about health, reflected in more critical psychological perspectives. (See chapter 6, which explores the contribution of psychology in more detail.) Health is also equated with happiness for many people (Cloninger and Zohar, 2011). Warwick-Booth and Cross (2018) note how happiness has gained more attention over the past few years as concerns about health move away from illness and disease and focus more on notions such as well-being. There are a number of studies that clearly demonstrate the links between health and happiness and, specifically, the role that social connections have to play in subjective experiences in this area (for example, Clark et al., 2017).