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....…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.

Overall, this article highlights the fact that specific coursework on mental health issues is valuable, even among educated populations and persons studying public health using other academic sources. Students in their fourth year showed higher levels of literacy than those in previous years. Potential implications include requiring clinical psychology for future mental health students at the undergraduate level. For improving public health literacy, given the importance of health knowledge and interpreting health information, requiring all students to take such a course might be useful. But it does not offer meaningful solutions to increase mental health literacy for persons beyond undergraduate or graduate school…