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Behavioral health and behavioral medicine: Frontiers for a new health psychology.

1980; American Psychological Association; Volume: 35; Issue: 9 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037//0003-066x.35.9.807

1935-990X

Joseph D. Matarazzo,

Empathy and Medical Education

Developments over the past decade in psychology, in medicine, in funding institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, and in industry make clear that the rapidly growing areas of behavioral medi- cine and behavioral health are presenting psychology as well as its sister professions with new opportunities for training, research, and practice. Specific develop- ments within psychology leading to the establishment of APA's Division 38 (Health Psychology) are traced. Also traced are some activities on the national level that have led to the development of organizations with a more interdisciplinary focus. Despite a modicum of overselling in some quarters, behavioral health- and health psychology appear to be ideas whose time has come. Some writers appear to be using the terms be- havioral health, behavioral medicine, and health psychology as synonyms. It is proposed here, how- ever, that henceforth we use the term behavioral medicine for that broad interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry, education, and practice which concerns itself with health and illness or related dysfunction (e.g., essential hypertension, choles- terolemia, stress disorders, addictive smoking, obesity, etc.); the term behavioral health for a new interdisciplinary subspecialty within behavioral medicine specifically concerned with the mainte- nance of health and the prevention of illness and dysfunction in currently healthy persons; and the term health psychology as a more discipline-specific term encompassing psychology's role as a science and profession in both of these domains. Although each of these terms made its lexical appearance only within the past several years, the idea of the exquisitely delicate and finely tuned relationship between mind and body that they embody is found in the earliest writings of civilization dating back to 5000 B.C. (Ehrenwald, 1976). The name of this mind-body field, has varied from century to century and recently from generation to genera- tion, changing in the 20th century from psycho-