Jesús de la source Arias, Full Professor de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Education. School de Education y Psicología
Health and behavioral emergency
As human beings need learning experiences to restructure their knowledge and their way of interacting with reality, Covid-19 has brought into our lives a common, unusual and unexpected experience for all of us. It can also, therefore, be an object of analysis and learning for the healthcare field. These days each of us has a vision of the problem, according to our formative bias and vision of reality. In my case, allow me to address my own vision of the medical-biological and behavioral health emergency. It is obvious that Covid-19 has all the components of a medical-biological health emergency, as accredited by the WHO itself. The precise configuration, functionality and structure of this rapidly spreading biological microorganism were not known. Neither were the conventional pharmaceutical means of primary prevention (vaccine), nor secondary or tertiary (pharmacological treatment, respirators, etc.). Consequently, the issue of contagions is already pandemic, with an evolution of geometric progressions.
However, I would like to go more deeply into the components of a behavioral health emergency. Unlike other diseases, where the individual can do less to control the development of the disease -for example, some classical diseases-, in this case it has become clear that the psychosocial or behavioral factor is central to its development and proliferation. How does the individual act in the face of a crisis such as that caused by covid-19? What is his behavior like? And how does he react to the message that is conveyed to society? I analyze these questions to reach the conclusion that a large number of health problems have a medical-biological component, but also a psycho-social one (behavioral, staff and contextual). At the level of each person, for example, the self-regulation variable, according to the previous research , is decisive for the self-care habits staff and social, as well as for the follow-up of health prescriptions. Thus, in the face of this crisis, people can have a regulatory (adequate), a-regulatory (do nothing) or dys-regulatory (do the opposite of what is suggested) behavior. Also, coping strategies have been shown to be essential to manage states of anxiety and fear before this unknown status , promoting a state of commitment versus exhaustion before this status. This level of variables is specific to each person, but can be induced externally, from the context.
Therefore, the environmental or psychosocial context design can also be regulatory, a-regulatory or deregulatory. The first, external regulator, financial aid or makes it likely that people will self-regulate (suitable messages and norms, social modeling, external control, etc.) and makes an expansion likely, by means of a mesocurtic curve, flattened and longer in time, with the consequent possible response and non-collapse of the health response system. The second, aregulator, does nothing and leaves people to self-regulate. Mathematical models that probabilize the expansion of the epidemic warn of a probabilistic platicurtic curve of expansion, i.e., overflow and collapse of the health system. However, together with the above, it is possible that there is an external contextual model deregulator. This is the one that encourages people to do the opposite of what they should do. In this case, the epidemiological consequences are lethal, since they function as a "biological bomb" for propagation and contagion. The assessment and the intervention on these and other behavioral variables - psychoeducational and psychosocial - are proper to the field of Psychology, as a behavioral science. Let us learn that medicine, biology and psychology should work together on epidemiological and health problems, from an integrated Bio-Psycho-Social model .