Annotated Bibliography

The current definition of health, formulated by the WHO, is no longer adequate for dealing with the new challenges in health care systems. Based on recent scientific debate, one can maintain that each definition of health should have at least 9 features to work well within the clinical scientific field. Moving from this perspective, a new definition has been developed for pursuing health, especially in the fields of chronic patients and older people.
Comments on the political challenges on the definition of health.

A few were unable to conceptualise this positive definition of health, some perceived it as an optimum end-state, whereas others saw it as an ongoing process. Many positive attributes of health and its influencers were identified. The more advanced understandings of this concept were of a holistic, multidimensional, expansive state where the all dimensions of health are interdependent and positively reinforcing. The results affirmed that wellness is more than psychological wellbeing, 'happiness' and life satisfaction.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed the diagnosis of “homosexuality” from the second edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This resulted after comparing competing theories, those that pathologized homosexuality as a mental disorder

This paper discusses attempts to define health within a public policy arena and practical and conceptual difficulties that arise. The definition can be seen as broadly holistic in comparison to other holistic definitions such as that of the World Health Organization. The nature of this holism and its grounding within the context of Aboriginal Australia is discussed. In particular, its implications for the phenomenon of medicalization, which may be associated with a holistic notion of health.

World Health Organization officially defined health as a “state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”1 The definition has remained unchanged since 1948. There is an argument that someone who is racist or intolerant could not meet the definition of health.