behavioral health

[bih-heyv-yer-uhl helth]

noun

1. the field of medicine concerned with a person’s activities or habits and how these affect physical, mental, and social well-being.

2. well-being as it relates to one’s activities and habits.

Word History and Origins

Origin of behavioral health¹

First recorded in 1970–75

Example Sentences

The personnel’s “quality of life,” the statement continued, is “addressed through the continued improvement of living facilities, balanced work-rest cycles, and access to chaplains, licensed clinical social workers, and behavioral health experts.”

From Los Angeles Times

The San Diego program will target majors in behavioral health, including clinicians, practitioners and psychiatric nurses — professions with a collective 8,000-worker shortfall in San Diego.

From Los Angeles Times

Those loans will be entirely forgiven for graduates who work in behavioral health for five years or more.

From Los Angeles Times

Midell latches onto that historical angle, which reads as an intentional creative decision as well as a moral one; if Emma’s ordeal is more thoroughly annotated than others’, a modicum of respect is owed to the record and to her suffering, whether it was a consequence of human ignorance or the genuine article in mankind’s long tradition of misdiagnosing behavioral health maladies as infernal.

From Salon

For example, as Newsom pointed out, behavioral health teams doing outreach to homeless people are funded by Medicaid dollars.

From Los Angeles Times