The challenges of future behavioral medicine

To a large extent, behavioral medicine originates from the United States, and more specifically from the scientific traditions of pragmatism and behaviorism. The core notion of individual learning, mastery, and development embedded in these traditions has lent support to an almost exclusive concern with individual behavioral modification. However, individual mastery and welfare are increasingly threatened by powerful adverse socioeconomic and sociocultural developments, especially by growing social inequalities in health and by expanding social disintegration. Social differentials in morbidity and mortality are documented even in the most economically advanced countries where health-damaging lifestyles (e.g., cigarette smoking, diet) and stressful conditions of relative deprivation in occupational life and elsewhere contribute to the observed pattern. In addition, detrimental effects on health produced by social disintegration are manifest, most notably in societies that undergo rapid socioeconomic change. Implications of these developments for future behavioral medicine are discussed at the level of scientific analysis and of preventive and therapeutic intervention.