ABSTRACT
This book has offered a psychological perspective on adolescent health and accentuated the role of individual differences. By adopting such an approach it is acknowledged that the medical model is sometimes inadequate for understanding illness and that one also needs to entertain other possible causal factors such as personality variables. As was indicated earlier, the boundaries between health and illness are not always clearly defined and so, in order to better understand illness, it is sometimes necessary to include the individual as well as the illness. Thus, in our review we noted the extent to which individual personality traits are implicated in many health behaviours such as body image, eating disorders, substance abuse, coping with stress, suicide, lifestyle, and so forth.
