Different Topics in Public Health

Annotated Bibliography: Public Health Psychology

Gourevitch, M.N., Kleiman, N., Brodsky, K., & Falco, K. (2022, April 13). Public health and

public safety: Converging upstream. American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). 112 (5) 716-718. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306798

The COVID-19 epidemic has coalesced the need for increased public safety as well as improved public health. It has made policymakers and providers alike more conscious of the need for health equality, given the unequal ways in which the burden of the pandemic was shouldered by persons of different occupations, income levels, and communities. The spotlight turned upon the issue of police brutality in the media has also highlighted inequalities in policing and public safety. Health is not merely an absence of disease but is also defined as a sense of physical, mental, and social wellbeing. Similarly, safety is not merely the absence of crime. The article calls upon a reevaluation of concepts of public health in relation to public safety and equality, and calls upon an understanding of how poverty, unequal access to education and opportunity, housing, and other inequalities can give rise to poorer health outcomes, including mental stress.

This is an article from a peer-reviewed journal, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). However, it makes rather broad connections between crime, public health and safety, health equality, and other issues that may be beyond the immediate scope and framework of knowledge of the authors. While it is true that the pandemic and police violence may be disproportionately felt by specific communities and this can generate negative psychological as well as physical outcomes due to perceptions of a lack of security, this specific article does not offer hard, statistical evidence to justify these conclusions.

The source is helpful in drawing attention to the fact that while the U.S. spends more on both healthcare and policing than comparable industrialized nations, its outcomes are poorer and poor attention to public health can generate mental stress for disadvantaged communities. It provides a broad philosophical overview of social injustices in health and safety. It is difficult to draw meaningful policy implications from the article, other than the fact it highlights a problem and draws attention to a definition of health and safety beyond the absence of specific and more targeted problems.

Kaplan R. M. (2009). Health psychology: where are we and where do we go from here? Mens

Sana Monographs, 7(1), 3–9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3151453/

This article highlights the fact that human behavior and human psychology can have a significant factor in preventing death in regards to a number of illnesses. There is a need to use biosocial models of treatment, rather than solely focusing on the physical aspects of disease. Health psychology often overlaps in the field of behavioral medicine. One example cited by the article is that of tobacco use. Even though there is widespread knowledge of the negative health effects of tobacco, this is not enough to see social health improvements. Behavioral modifications, public health communications, and public health decisions related to psychology have been needed in combination to reduce overall tobacco use. Although heart disease, cancer, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have other causes (including genetic ones), reducing tobacco use has had significant public health gains by targeting behavioral issues from a health psychology standpoint on a social level.

This article, although it covers a number of broad public health issues, is significant because of its ongoing applications. Health cannot be addressed on a purely physical basis, because it has lived applications in people’s lives. People must make good choices on a personal basis. On the other hand, it is necessary to support those good choices. The article does address the need for better collaboration between mental and physical health clinicians, but does not address the role in alleviating poverty and improving access to mental as well as physical health supportive services in the role of treating disease.

While this article does address an important issue, namely the need for better collaboration between health psychology experts and the need to assess health psychology to improve patient outcomes in terms of their effect upon life quality, it needs to better address the role of economics and healthcare access itself in terms of how it affects patient perceptions of the need for care. It does address gender disparities in quality of care and the need for better documentation of disparities, but only at the very end of the article. It also does not address how such disparities can result in economic and occupational discrimination, due to reduced access to quality healthcare.

Miles, R., Rabin, L., Krishnan, A., Grandoit, E. & Kloskowski, K.   (2020) Mental health literacy

in a diverse sample of undergraduate students: demographic, psychological, and academic correlates. BMC Public Health 20, 1699 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09696-0

Although mental health terminology is increasingly used in the popular media lexicon, this does not always translate into meaningful understanding of mental health issues. This article encompasses a study of 1,213 undergraduates, and thus focused on a largely educated, young population majoring in the health and public sciences field. Taking a course in clinical psychology was found to significantly increase scores on the in-person assessments of mental health literacy, as did personal or family/peer experiences with mental health issues.

While the article suggests that education is helpful in enabling persons who may enter the field of mental or public health to have a higher level of health literacy, it also suggests the value of personal experiences. However, it also allows that the fact that these students wished to take such a course may have resulted in self-selecting bias in favor of students with an interest in mental health and greater sensitivity regarding the subject. Previous studies cited by the researchers noted that males majoring in STEM subjects exhibited the lowest levels of mental health literacy. Previous studies were also inconsistent regarding the value of personal experiences. Also, this study was relatively limited, given it focused only upon majors in the health fields and college students, while previous studies indicated that older respondents were less literate regarding mental health issues.