Health Psychology in Australia

Introduction

There has probably never been a human society without health inequalities. Human societies tend to have a clear power-based hierarchy. With increased power comes increased influence and access to wealth generation and health expertise and services. Such human societies will have health inequalities. You can capture society's health inequality by examining the profile of the ruling class. In typical Western societies, the ruling class tends to be Caucasian, heterosexual, male and well educated, with good social networks and a well-paid prestigious job. Clearly the ruling class has a high socioeconomic status (SES) and it certainly does not have any stigma associated with its status. Stigma is about perceptions and perceptions matter, as we will see in the present chapter. When it comes to your health, it all matters: SES, employment status, occupation, marital status, education, isolation (e.g. social support), sex (male, female), unemployment, culture, sexual orientation, religion or lack thereof, race (e.g. Indigenous), living in an urban versus rural community, and health literacy.

Different factors that capture your standing in society affect your health but it can be difficult to discover exactly how they do so. These factors do not exist in a vacuum. If you are homeless, you are also likely to be poor with a low-paying job, if you even have a job, and it will likely be in a low prestigious occupation requiring low education levels. Does your birth status, courtesy of your parents, determine the rest of your life? The answer is ‘no, not 100%, but to some extent’. Thus it is up to society to make sure that the factors we can control, such as education and healthcare access, are as equal as possible across all Australians to make sure that we have a population that is as healthy as possible.