ABSTRACT
In the United States, organized psychology was initially cautious in its approach to involvement in health care. But, by the late 1970s a small number of clinical psychologists began to create an identity as health psychologists. The practice of health psychology developed as an allied health profession during the biomedicalization and corporatization of medicine in the last third of the twentieth century. Health psychology, with its emphasis on the individual, fit well within U.S. medicine, which focused on the disease as a pathology of the individual. As a result, psychology missed many opportunities to conceptualize health and illness in a broader framework that included the impact of poverty, race, income inequities, and other social determinants of health. Due to its good fit with corporate medicine in an emerging neoliberal environment, health psychology grew steadily over the next several decades.
