Critical health psychologists’ call to recognition and action: Critical health psychology, participatory action research and the situation in Turkey

Health psychology has the property of being a relatively new subfield among other subdisciplines of psychology. Health psychology explores the factors that affect health and disease processes and plans interventions to improve health. Critical views arising from the dissatisfaction with the dominance of the positivist view within mainstream psychology have also begun to be expressed in the field of health psychology, and the critical health psychology sub-discipline has been developed with the observation of some limitations of health psychology in the historical process. Critical health psychology contributes to a more holistic approach to the concepts of health and illness, with the aim of overcoming the limitations of mainstream health psychology. However, critical health psychology and its methods are not sufficiently recognized in Turkey. In this study, the criticisms of critical health psychology towards the mainstream and its studies to overcome them were compiled. The aim of this article was to increase the recognition of critical health psychology and participatory action research in Turkey.