From Stress and Coping to Healing and Suffering: Understanding Health Processes Through Contextual Lenses

The rise of health psychology has been strongly influenced by the traditional paradigm and its contribution cannot be denied in relieving health related problems. However, along with enjoying the success of the traditional paradigm in health psychology we need to remind ourselves the goal of health psychology and to be cognizant of its role in achieving that goal. Health psychology, in an eager rush to establish itself as a scientific discipline and to show its compliance to the scientific community, has lost and ignored the voices of people being studied. The paper is aimed to present a critical review of health psychology by drawing a parallel between health psychology and biomedical modal. It also tries to explicate how the lacuna created by health psychology can be filled by shifting its paradigmatic orientation, i. e. by shifting its focus from intra psychic processes to the socio-cultural realities and subjecivities of people being studied and to promote social justice and diversity.