11.3.5: Being a Health Psychologist

Training as a clinical health psychologist provides a variety of possible career options. Clinical health psychologists often work on teams of physicians, social workers, allied health professionals, and religious leaders. These teams may be formed in locations like rehabilitation centers, hospitals, primary care offices, emergency care centers, or in chronic illness clinics. Work in each of these settings will pose unique challenges in patient care, but the primary responsibility will be the same. Clinical health psychologists will evaluate physical, personal, and environmental factors contributing to illness and preventing improved health. In doing so, they will then help create a treatment strategy that takes into account all dimensions of a person’s life and health, which maximizes its potential for success. Those who specialize in health psychology can also conduct research to discover new health predictors and risk factors, or develop interventions to prevent and treat illness. Researchers studying health psychology work in numerous locations, such as universities, public health departments, hospitals, and private organizations. In the related field of behavioral medicine, careers focus on the application of this type of research. Occupations in this area might include jobs in occupational therapy, rehabilitation, or preventative medicine. Training as a health psychologist provides a wide skill set applicable in a number of different professional settings and career paths.

The Future Of Health Psychology

Much of the past medical research literature provides an incomplete picture of human health. “Health care” is often “illness care.” That is, it focuses on the management of symptoms and illnesses as they arise. As a result, in many developed countries, we are faced with several health epidemics that are difficult and costly to treat. These include obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, to name a few. The National Institutes of Health have called for researchers to use the knowledge we have about risk factors to design effective interventions to reduce the prevalence of preventable illness. Additionally, there are a growing number of individuals across developed countries with multiple chronic illnesses and/or lasting disabilities, especially with older age. Addressing their needs and maintaining their quality of life will require skilled individuals who understand how to properly treat these populations. Health psychologists will be on the forefront of work in these areas.

With this focus on prevention, it is important that health psychologists move beyond studying risk (e.g., depression, stress, hostility, low socioeconomic status) in isolation, and move toward studying factors that confer resilience and protection from disease. There is, fortunately, a growing interest in studying the positive factors that protect our health (e.g., Diener & Chan, 2011; Pressman & Cohen, 2005; Richman, Kubzansky, Maselko, Kawachi, Choo, & Bauer, 2005) with evidence strongly indicating that people with higher positivity live longer, suffer fewer illnesses, and generally feel better. Seligman (2008) has even proposed a field of “Positive Health” to specifically study those who exhibit “above average” health—something we do not think about enough. By shifting some of the research focus to identifying and understanding these health-promoting factors, we may capitalize on this information to improve public health.

Innovative interventions to improve health are already in use and continue to be studied. With recent advances in technology, we are starting to see great strides made to improve health with the aid of computational tools. For example, there are hundreds of simple applications (apps) that use email and text messages to send reminders to take medication, as well as mobile apps that allow us to monitor our exercise levels and food intake (in the growing mobile-health, or m-health, field). These m-health applications can be used to raise health awareness, support treatment and compliance, and remotely collect data on a variety of outcomes. Also exciting are devices that allow us to monitor physiology in real time; for example, to better understand the stressful situations that raise blood pressure or heart rate. With advances like these, health psychologists will be able to serve the population better, learn more about health and health behavior, and develop excellent health-improving strategies that could be specifically targeted to certain populations or individuals. These leaps in equipment development, partnered with growing health psychology knowledge and exciting advances in neuroscience and genetic research, will lead health researchers and practitioners into an exciting new time where, hopefully, we will understand more and more about how to keep people healthy.

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