Health intervention

A Health intervention is an effort that promotes behaviour that optimizes mental and physical health, or discourages or re frames behaviours considered to be potentially health-threatening. To the former category belong the alignment of one or more forms of authority, influence, or evidence with behaviours intended to regulate the mind and body into a state of productivity conducive to the prevailing norms of a given society. In Western societies steeped in what Max Weber described as a Protestant ethics-driven form of capitalism, such interventions vaporize disease-preventing behaviours and tend to equate good health, personal happiness, and ever-optimal bodily and mental productivity. Approved or normative behaviour may include daily physical exercise, regimented nutrition, meditation or prayer, regulated sleep hygiene, safer sex practices, and the development of a socially minded sense of responsibility. Behaviour eliminating or reducing forms of health intervention include discouraging forms of immediate gratification that, according to some set of prevailing norms, turn dangerous or unproductive when left unchecked: overindulgence in certain foods, excessive intake of nicotine, alcohol, and other mood-enhancing or mind-altering substances, and a range of compulsive behaviours including anonymous sex with multiple partners, indulgence in uncomfortable emotional states (sadness, rage, jealousy), or gambling or spending beyond one’s financial means. Perhaps the most overlooked and most important health intervention is the encouragement of at-risk subjects to develop a viable theory of mind that supersedes authoritarian structures and counts behaviour as healthy or unhealthy, dependent in part to how they prove imperative extensions to or unnecessary to the personal carriage of a defensible, ethics-centred value system.

Health interventions may be run by a variety of organizations, including health departments and private organizations. Such interventions can have a variety of forms (e.g. websites, short movies or 'commercials', posters, protocols for counselling sessions, or plans to persuade key actors to enact changes in the environment, for example by decreasing the offer of unhealthy food at schools), and often consist of a combination of Behaviour Change Methods that target specific psychological determinants of or environmental conditions for behaviour. Several systematic protocols exist to assist developing such interventions, one of the most well-known being Intervention Mapping.

In recent years various forms of intervention involving family and friends have been developed and used to encourage people with self-destructive behaviours or addictions to accept help. This started with the Johnson Intervention in the 1960s. Since then several variations on this basic methodology have been developed, each with its advantages and disadvantages.