Is critical health psychology healthy

Abstract

In contrast to mainstream health psychology, critical health psychology explicitly sought approaches to health that took account of contexts, power relations, and broader social and political structures. Developed from a breadth of ideas, enthusiasm, theoretical, methodological, and practice strengths from the late 1990s a number of events signalled the arrival of critical health psychology as a sub-field of psychology and in the social sciences more generally. The inaugural critical health psychology conference “Reconstructing Health Psychology” in 1999, and biennial conferences are significant markers of these developments. Six years on from the first conference, critical health psychology faces a series of challenges linked to global politics, research, and professionalization. This paper provides a context to the emergence of some of these challenges, case study illustrations of their effects, and identifies various areas for further work in order to meet the aims of CHP.