SPONS RED CONTENT
WHY WE NEED A COMMON DEFINITION for Well-Being
by Nick Dewan , M . D ., vice president of behavioral health for GuideWell and Florida Blue
For decades , policy makers and researchers in the U . S . and internationally have studied both mental illness and conversely mental health concepts such as happiness , purpose , relationships , and resilience to understand the factors that promote well-being . There are ongoing efforts to continue to improve how the field defines and measures mental illness , but efforts to clearly define the positive factors of mental health , notably mental well-being , have been more limited . In essence , mental well-being is not the mere absence of distress but the presence of a positive and hopeful state .
As a mental health community , we have emphasized the need for research of mental health disorders for hundreds of years but research to understand mental well-being has been more recent .
For example , a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2022 , confirms life satisfaction of working adults and their happiness mutually influence each other . The article states “ life satisfaction plays a major role in happiness , and at the same time , feelings of happiness help working adults to enhance and record higher life satisfaction .”
And this article from Industrial Psychiatry Journal includes resilience as an attribute of positive mental well-being .
Why It Matters
Defining and communicating mental well-being in a consistent way will help scale mental health awareness campaigns and forge partnerships to better integrate mental health care by rallying around a concise , common definition .
It also provides a better way to evaluate outcomes at the individual level and potentially across populations . Once you have a defined data set , you can then measure progress to develop programs and interventions that focus on whole person health .
An opinion piece titled Reimagining Health – Flourishing , published in JAMA , concludes “ the concept
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