Abstract
The concluding chapter can be read as a stand-alone introduction to existential health psychology and supplies a summary of four changes in perspective which a healthcare worker can make that will allow her to view her patients in their existentiality, thereby finding what was in their blind-spot. These are treating the how and not the what; understanding the illness in addition to the disease; treating the person and not the disease; and viewing the patient person in his or her Otherness, using the relational phenomenology of Martin Buber.
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Notes
- 1.
Incidentally, if I were to be speaking to a group of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, then I would be advocating that we throw away evidence-based practices as they have been carried out in bad faith, with the hopeful expectation that psychology and psychiatry might actually be medicine. In so doing, psychology and psychiatry have turned their back on the problem of human suffering which cannot be medicalized.
- 2.
It is one I might expect to find within my own field of humanistic psychology, but by and large the latter have remained steadfast in their allegiance to the American Psychological Association. The latter is a proponent of the biomedical model of mental disorders.
- 3.
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Whitehead, P.M. (2019). Conclusion: Caring for the Human Being—An Outline for Applied Existential Health Psychology. In: Existential Health Psychology. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_9
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