Towards a public health psychology
| Date | 14 September 2012 |
| Pages | 153-156 |
| Published date | 14 September 2012 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465721211261941 |
| Author | Martin Seager |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Policy Analysis
Towards a public health psychology
Martin Seager
Abstract
Purpose – This paper argues for the need for a public health psychology based on the same
epidemiological principles that came from the medical work of John Snow in the Victorian era.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on the work of a national advisory group set up in 2006,
evidence is put forward that supports the existence of universal psychological needs underlying the
human condition and human well-being. In a country with a low rating from UNICEF for well-being
amongst its young people, the case is made for using these principles to inform health practice and
policy rather than responding reactively to mental health disorders as discrete conditions.
Findings – The paper finds that effective health services and happier communities can only hope to be
built by having an explicit scientific model of the human condition that includes universal psychological
needs.
Originality/value – The paper argues the need for an effective public health psychology based on the
universal psychological needs of the human condition.
Keywords Public health psychology, Attachment, Universalpsychological needs, Human condition,
Public health, Psychology
Paper type Viewpoint
As a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist one of my great heroes for many years has
been a medical man, Dr John Snow (1813-1858). He was the father of epidemiology and
public health medicine, who looked beyond the symptoms of cholera to its causes in the
water supply of Victorian London. By thinking in this new way he prevented much suffering
and death. However, if we have had public health biology since the nineteenth century, what
is the status of public health psychology in the twenty-first century? Like Oscar Wilde, I am not
one for establishing artificial boundaries between the body and the soul. What is bad for one
is also bad for the other as Dorian Gray ultimately discovered.
We have to ask ourselves: where is the great body of knowledge and policy on the
psychological living conditions that give rise to good or poor health, happiness, suffering,
death and suicide? In answering this, it has to be admitted that we are still very much in the
pre-Victorian age when it comes to a psychological ‘‘population science’’. We are still
reactively treating mental health as a collection of discrete symptoms and disorders rather
than examining the underlying psychological conditions, processes and natural laws that
give rise to good and poor mental health.
In truth, over and above the obvious psychological impact of poor physical health, poverty
and social exclusion, it is not hard to find core psychological evidence for what makes people
unhappy and what damages or destroys their personality, spirit and mental well-being.
This evidence is all around us, not just in our everyday lives but most obviously in our popular
art forms (novels, plays, films, operas, songs, musicals, poems, sculptures, paintings).
Human art constitutes nothing other than an attempt to reflect in empathic depth upon the
DOI 10.1108/17465721211261941 VOL. 11 NO. 3 2012, pp. 153-156, QEmerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1746-5729
j
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH
j
PAGE 153
Martin Seager is a
Consultant Clinical
Psychologist and Adult
Psychotherapist at South
West Yorkshire Partnership
Foundation NHS Trust,
Halifax, UK.
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