We explain what social health is in a community, the factors that intervene in it and its impact on individual and collective life.
What is social health?
The concept of social health may not be as common to us as physical health or even emotional health, but it is as important as any of these. Social health is understood as the set of economic and social factors and conditions that influence the health status of individuals in the long term.
These are community-type factors (rather than individual ones, such as the inheritance genetics or personal lifestyle) that also have a vital impact on the expectation of life wave vulnerability of individuals against diseases. For this reason, who studies these types of factors through the Commission on Social Determinants of Health.
Our social health is determined by the type of social ties that we can establish in our community, in the positive or negative influence they exert, and in the conditions of harmony or stress in which our social life develops. Factors such as:
- Exclusion and social marginalization.
- Conditions of employment.
- Programs of public health and access to educational services.
- Gender equality Y discrimination cultural
- Urban living conditions.
- Nature of emotional ties and emotional life.
It is known that in toxic, impoverished, isolated and constantly impoverished social environments, social ties tend to deteriorate and become sources of suffering, ultimately having negative consequences for physical and mental health.
This does not have to do with the dynamics of personal improvement or self-help, but with the degree of health of the social environment in which individuals develop.
That is why socially isolated individuals, estranged from the community or marginalized by it, have great difficulties for social and economic advancement, even as productive members of the community. society. On the contrary, those who enjoy better social health are more likely to developing even if they are on the same economic rung.
The main contributors to social health in a nation are usually the politics public of Health, as well as initiatives to combat poverty, the inequality and segregation in its various possible facets.