A Biopsychosocial Approach to Health

This unique text takes a holistic approach to show you how different biological and medical aspects of health operate at the cellular level all the way up to the societal level, and back again.

It explains key biological aspects of health at the cellular level (such as epigenetics and oxidative stress) to give you a solid understanding of how health is created in the context of the person, before working upwards to examine public health issues ranging from cardiovascular disease to unemployment and loneliness. Throughout the text, you will encounter a diverse range of cross-cultural examples, real-world scenarios and key questions which will help you put the theories and cell-to-society perspective you have learned into practice.

With interdisciplinary perspectives from psychoneuroimmunology and epidemiology, this book offers an integrated consideration of health and its biopsychosocial determinants. It is a must-read for students of health psychology, applied psychology, nursing, and public health, and it has been added to reading lists internationally.

Rachel C. Sumner is a psychobiologist and chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society Division of Health Psychology and a senior research fellow at Cardiff Metropolitan University.