A Biopsychosocial Approach to Health
From Cell to Society
- Rachel C. Sumner - Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
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.
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.
Sumner has thoughtfully collated her expertise and knowledge to create an insightful book that will instill curiosity and positively influence our future practitioners. This book, A Biopsychosocial Approach to Health, captures the intersection of biology and psychology, and all the facets of health that are touched by it. Creating engagement and immersion in heavy topics can be difficult, but Sumner has done this with ease.
This book explores the varying influences on health and wellbeing and will encourage students to consider a wider range of perspectives in their clinical reasoning when assessing people and working with service users.
Excellent text book for teaching at Levels 4 and 5. The narrative is accessible and easy to understand. Topics are approached in a systematic fashion and encompass all elements of health and social care. Lots packed in to a small but effective text book. I will use it on several different modules to aid my teaching and recommend to students as a generic book for the Foundation Degree in Health and Social Care.