Psychology in the Context of Health and Social Care

This chapter emphasizes the importance of psychology in the context of health and social care. For many years, psychology and the other social sciences were viewed by the medical profession as ‘soft sciences’, interesting but unimportant. With the advent of research into the links between physical and mental states in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it is now possible to demonstrate that psychology can make a fundamental difference to physical as well as mental health. In this chapter, we explore the nature of psychology and its relevance to health and social care. We outline the different schools of thought and methods of inquiry in psychology. We seek to distinguish between psychology as an academic discipline and popular notions of psychology, and identify professionals whose practice is mainly concerned with the application of psychology. In order to show how psychology can be applied to health and social care, we introduce a family scenario whose characters appear in examples throughout the book.