| Summary: | "Few would argue about the benefits of prevention. We all receive messages daily about the importance of a maintaining a healthy diet and body weight, getting enough sleep, practicing safe sex, avoiding the dangers of tobacco, and using alcohol responsibly, to list just a few. All of these efforts are made to ward off physical and psychological ills and to promote personal well-being by maintaining healthy lifestyles now and in the future. Some people will strictly adhere to prevention and health promotion practices, others will ignore them, and most will attempt to follow some of them with varying degrees of success. Prevention science as a professional specialty has goals similar to those of individual, self-directed efforts to promote health. However, prevention science seeks to prevent psychological and physical ills and promote overall health and well-being through evidence-based practices at individual and systemic levels. Therefore, prevention is important because the professional specialty addresses health promotion at individual levels of intervention, as well as through larger social levels of intervention to improve and strengthen health and well-being across society. Prevention is an interdisciplinary specialty that requires conceptual sophistication, research, and policy actions from multiple disciplines, including psychology, counseling, social work, education, health sciences, economics, and public affairs. Given the major advances in prevention in recent years, a major goal of this book is to present in one volume prevention as a specialty in psychology with applicability to other mental health professions. The book is designed to close a gap in the education and training of students, psychologists, other mental health professionals, and those in other professions who desire increased knowledge and training in prevention. The book is a broad-based and resource-rich introduction to prevention, giving attention to interventions and research in different settings across the life span. The content is appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate students desiring an introduction to prevention history, theory, research, and applications, and also for professionals who have received little, if any, education and training in prevention"--Introduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
|
|---|
