Illness isn’t always something that just happens to us. The choices
we make, the ways we conduct our lives, the beliefs we hold, all
have profound consequences for the health of our bodies. Smoking,
excess drinking and over-eating are obvious examples of behaviours
that have a direct effect on our health, and which in many instances,
we have a strong degree of control over. For these reasons, health
psychologists play an increasingly central role in health care. They
want to know why we adopt certain behaviours to excess, even when
we know them to be harmful, and they investigate ways to get us to
reduce or cease these behaviours once we’ve started them.
But health psychology isn’t only about trying to control excess consump-
tion. With illnesses such as breast cancer and testicular cancer, where
early detection can vastly improve survival rates, self-checking becomes
vitally important. Health psychologists investigate ways of encouraging
people to follow such procedures, and they explore the reasons that deter
many people from doing so.
Psychological factors also come into play in the event of a global
pandemic, such as the swine flu of 2009 when millions of people needed
to adopt stricter hygiene in order to help halt the virus’s spread. The
psycholinguist Brigitte Nerlich has argued that, in such circumstances,
apocalyptic metaphors of the kind favoured by tabloid newspapers
may grab people’s attention, but actually end up inhibiting behavioural
change. The message that “we’re all going to die” paralyses people,
whereas calm advice on how to control the threat is far more constructive.
Psychologists can also play a part once an illness has been diag-
nosed, by working in palliative care with patients and their families, for
example, or by helping people adjust to the life changes imposed by a
chronic illness or disability. They have helped inform labelling practice
on drug packaging and have devised easy-to-use scheduling sheets to
help patients keep track of which drugs they need to take and when.