Essay Example on Health is defined as a state of complete physical mental and social well Being

Health is defined as a state of complete physical mental and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity 1There is an intrinsically entwined relation between health of the individual and health of a population The health of the collective population is referred to as public health and defined by the Faculty of Public Health 2010 as The science and art of promoting and protecting health and well being preventing ill health and prolonging life through the organised efforts of society Health promotion is one of the important feature of public health and health development The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion WHO 1986 describes health promotion as a process that aims to enhance positive health and prevent or reduce ill health Health promotion is a core function of public health defined in the Bangkok Charter for Health Promotion in a Globalized World WHO 2005 as Health promotion is the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants and thereby improve their health 2 Health promotion is considered as a process that strengthens health condition shapes attitudes supports behavioural changes to attain utmost physical and mental health and organizes social and physical environment of a person 

3 4 Based on a health promotion approach people should be able to accept responsibility for their health and adopt a healthy lifestyle 5The health promoting component of lifestyle is a positive approach to living that leads individuals toward realising their highest potential for well being 6 Thus a positive approach towards health is needed The concept of positive adaptation despite adversity has existed practically since humans began reflecting on their own behaviour Resilience an English word derived from the Latin word resiliens for springing back or jumping back up was first coined to describe the strength of natural environments in the physical sciences It took on an additional preventive meaning some time in the last century in part because it helped to change the focus of research from pathologies to opportunities for supportive action If an environment recovers from a natural disaster it is said to demonstrate resilience The term began to appear in the psychological sciences and was a metaphor for the ability of individuals to recover from exposure to chronic and acute stress 

7 8 The roots of resilience research can be traced back to pioneering research with children of schizophrenics during the 1960s and 1970s Garmezy 1974 along with Anthony 1974 and Rutter 1979 found that among these children at high risk for psychopathology was a subset of children who had surprisingly healthy patterns 9 As a construct resilience has been studied by researchers for a number of years Modern resilience studies originated among psychologists and psychiatrists Researchers interested in psychological and social determinants of health picked up the concept and have gradually extended its use from the domain of mental health to health in general Early work on resilience was concerned with the individual but more recently researchers have become interested in resilience as a feature of whole communities Historically psychology has focused on identifying effective approaches to addressing various mental health difficulties Positive psychology is a relatively new branch of psychology that shifts the focus from trying to identity what is going wrong to understanding how we maximise mental wellbeing for a satisfactory life Positive psychology is defined as the study of conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people groups and institutions 10Resilience is one of the key component of Positive psychology Resilience is particularly important for young people The transition from being a child to an adolescent to a young adult occurs over a relative short period of time and the rapid changes in physical psychological and social development presents with a number of challenges e g managing mood fluctuations dealing with romantic relationships establishing an independent identity and study and school demands 11 Adolescents constitutes around 1 2 billion of the total population around the world and nine out of ten of these young people live in developing countries About 21 of Indian population is adolescents about 243 million 12 13 Adolescent being a both stressful and transitional period it is important to capture this population so that health promoting behaviours can be seeded in an early stage As per Wang et al a good health promoting behaviour depends on the living habits adopted during early years of life 14It has been suggested that health behaviours learned in adolescence set precedence for healthy habits that extend throughout the lifespan15and even into next generation