ISCM of Sri Balaji Vidyapeeth · Transcript · · Updated
The salutogenic question: Ease, dis-ease, and the river in between – Transcript
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Summary
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- Professor Aaron antonovsky developed the concept of salutogenesis to focus on the origin of health rather than pathogenesis, which investigates the origin of disease.
- The salutogenic model views health as a continuum between ease and dis-ease where individuals must continually navigate the River of Life.
- Sense of coherence comprises three interrelated components: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness.
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thank you very much Namaste everyone I am very uh glad and honored um to be here and thank you for your very kind words Professor anande um I think I wouldn't be here without the support of the institute for salutogenesis in Zurich LED as you said by Professor Garrick Bauer
um the belonging to that Institute enabled me to Advance my own salutogenic studies and it is through them actually that I came to know of the iscm uh we first met by email in October I think it was and as you described the rest is history um I will
try to share my screen now and hopefully um hopefully uh it will be okay can you see this okay thank you um so today I'm going to talk uh give a introductory talk about salutogenesis uh
this is a word or a term that uh most of you have heard some of you uh know it well and perhaps for them it will be sort of describing salutogenesis from a different angle uh and for others of you the the term you heard the term but it is still uh new so this will be sort of an introductory to uh salutogenesis and
other relevant Concepts I will talk about salutogenesis and ease this is and the river in between uh as professor anande said I'm a social psychologist I work mainly in recent years in mental health promotion research uh and I'm also a musician and a photographer in the uh little spare time that I have
um I would like to take you all back to the 1970s in the 1970s uh medicine was taught and thought according to the um uh to the biomedical pathogenic model what is the biomedical pathogenic model in short it says there is a pathogen a pathogen
is something that causes disease and disease in the most General uh way disease can be a heart failure it can be God forbid cancer it can be a broken leg it can be depression it can be covet 19.
whatever specific disease uh pathogen causes and then there is a cure or there is no cure that's in a question mark some diseases have a cure some do not in a more figurative manner think of a river of disease imagine yourself walking along a river the sun is shining the flowers are blooming the birds are singing and
suddenly you fall into the water you fall into the water that means you become sick with something you're a diet you are diagnosed with having a specific sickness once you fall into the water intuitive medicine comes along doctors tried to help you focusing on the disease asking what causes the disease
and how to cure or treat the disease sometimes they succeed sometimes they do not a few years later came along the movement of preventive medicine preventive medicine means if you're walking outside along the river they try to help you not to fall into the river but preventive medicine focuses on disease as well it says if you don't
want cancer don't smoke if you don't want diabetes don't eat too much sweet food and so on and so forth both Curative medicine and preventive medicine focus on disease now at the same time in the early 70s um in a small office in a small town in Israel sat Professor Aaron antonovsky
Professor Aaron antonovsky was a sociologist who did work in the in in the field of health and medical uh sociology and as Professor anande mentioned uh uh Aaron antonovsky was my late father um I at the time was a young teenager I didn't uh care too much about uh my
father's work he worked at the bengalyon University of the Negev which is a part of Southern Israel um and uh he was one of the founders of the medical school in uh in bengurion University I knew he was working at The Faculty of Health Sciences I knew he was doing research I knew he was a professor but you know as teenagers I wasn't I wasn't very uh interesting interested
um as it turned out to me years later he was uh uh engaged then in a ground what became a groundbreaking study on the adjustment of women to menopause his study had several hundred actually over a thousand women in his sample and uh he asked questions about how how
women in the in her in their 50s adjust to menopause that means these women were born in the 20s or the late 1910s or the early 1920s and in his study there were two specific sub samples one uh sample was women who were born in Germany around 1920
and uh came to Israel or what would be later on the state of Israel state of Israel was established in 1948. so this is a woman who arrived in Israel in the mid-30s when they were teenagers or in their early twenties um before uh before World War II another sub-sample of women were women born in
Germany the same place the same time but they came to Israel after World War II and had gone through World War II in concentration camps in Nazi concentration camps which is uh probably the most difficult experience one can think of um a question was asked in this study
about uh how how is life uh and these are the general results are out of women who were not in Nazi concentration camps during World War II 51 reported good adjustment good adjustment means we have a family we have a job we have friends we go on trips life life is okay life is good
among the women who were incar Nazi concentration camps during the war only 29 uh reported good adjustment now this difference between 51 and 29 uh is large you know there was once uh there was a famous statistician who said if you need statistics to see if you have found anything then you have not found anything
um so anyway these results are expected not to say trivial I mean what's so uh what's so special in these results it's it's quite obvious that women uh who did not go uh through the war would be in much better uh condition than women who who suffered the most excruciating terrible horrible experience one can think of so my father was tells that he was
looking at these data and he said well there's nothing you know nothing exciting about this and then suddenly he said to himself I'm an idiot I'm not looking at the right place instead of looking at the difference between these two groups I should look only at this piece of data out of women who are in the concentration camps it's not one or two
or three women who who said they're they're doing well it is almost a third of those hundreds of women in that sub-sample that said life is good we sometimes have dreams we sometimes have uh painful memories but in general life is okay 30 years after the after the war they came to Israel as immigrants to a new uh
country very different from their country of origin they went through three Wars that occurred in Israel since uh its establishment until the 1970s how can this be explained how can women who went through all this still report good adjustment what what were their powers what were the resources what were their strengths
what enabled them to cope nobody in the medical establishment has ever asked this question because the medical Western world was uh occupied by the question what is the origin of disease and accordingly there was a very uh there still is a very widely used term pathogenesis
pathogenesis literally means the origin of disease Genesis is origin or beginning and patho disease and my father asked the question of what is the origin of Health but this question had no term in the scientific literature so uh if what is the origin of disease is pathogenesis what word should be used
for the origin of health so my father thought and thought and thought and couldn't come up with an idea so he did what he usually does or would do in this situation ask my mother but my mother's thought and thought and thought and couldn't come up with a word either and then one day my father said I got it if the origin of disease is pathogenesis the origin of Health would be
salutogenesis Genesis beginning or origin and salute in Latin means health so salutogenesis would be the term applied to the question of what is the origin of Health now it seems as though pathogenesis and saluteogenesis may be the two sides of the same coin but they are not
now I can ask you but I'm not if I were present physically with you I would ask you to raise your hands I know it's possible on Zoom too but I don't see many of you now because you're on the side of my screen but if I would ask who was sick during the last 12 months I assume some of you would raise your hands and okay uh and further if I ask what was your sickness what were you
diagnosed with you could answer maybe you had the flu maybe you had covid-19 maybe you broke an arm maybe you were in a short period of depression whatever you know what you were sick with now I will ask another question who was healthy during the last 12 months well probably most of you would raise your hands including those who raised your hands before
and further I see you raise your hand Professor anande so I will ask you what was your health what health were you diagnosed with now this is difficult to answer okay um you can tell me what kind of sickness you had what you would because you were diagnosed according to specific medical criteria like blood tester or something else but if I asked you what was your