PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT ON HEALTH OF HEALING ENVIRONMENT:

From the mid-1960s a new field of psychological enquiry developed and it began to influence a number of other disciplines, particularly architecture. The contemporary field of environmental psychology now includes the study of the transactions and interrelationships between people and their socio-physical surroundings (including man-made and natural environments) and their relation to the other social, environmental and biological sciences. Information and methodology from this field are now used in a variety of areas including cognitive mapping, disaster planning, crime reduction, decision heuristics, risk management and many aspects of architectural and environmental design. Cognitive mapping is the process by which we acquire, encode, store, retrieve and decode information about our spatial surroundings.

As we know that each individual is affected by the surrounding environment and behave accordingly. In this way we can alter or change the behavior of the users by providing them a pleasurable environment. Such as hospital is a place where most of the people remain stressed because of their health problem. Children who are not only a source of pleasure in our homes but also a future capital for the country. Childhood is a very sensitive age in life span of a human being; they are very sensitive to the surrounding environment. So if they are admitted in a hospital because of some disease, then existing condition of hospitals in our country especially in Multan is not good and their rough environments have negative effect on their health.
"The children want the new hospital to feel home-like and comfortable, but not too much like home because they feel that they want to be able to leave {the hospital},"
Says Del Sole.

Now a new concept is being developed in hospitals to put the children far from their fear of treatment. Hospitals are designed on the basis of their psychological treatment needs. What they like, dislike and all other things are considered important while designing the children hospital. And they feel pleasure and happiness in this environment for their treatment.
So the main objective is that we should also incorporate environmental psychology in architecture to provide such environment to the children, which have soothing effect on the children. And they find a healing environment for their health. The advance psychological research has now proven that children nature has wonderful potentialities of response and reflex in case of illness. This in-born extra ordinary human capability has prompted the human designer to design a special health building to the specific need and the requirement of the ill and sick children, which can house within it all the necessary sections which they need.

2006

2007