What is “mental wellbeing”? The importance of a common definition
What is “mental wellbeing”? The importance of a common definition
Professor Lindsay Oades, Provost at the University of York Mumbai; and Dr Matthew Iasiello, School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, Adelaide University:
The lack of a common definition for mental wellbeing has limited progress in mental health policy and treatment.
In any other profession, you couldn’t aim for a positive outcome to a strategy, treatment, or intervention, if you had hundreds of different ways to measure the severity of the problem in the first place, and so it really isn’t surprising that so many sectors struggle creating programmes to promote positive mental health.
The real significance of having an agreed definition of mental wellbeing is how we can use it in practice, particularly how governments measure national wellbeing, support public health strategies and fund new interventions.
Our study, a project led at the University of Adelaide, was published in Nature Mental Health. We surveyed 122 experts in areas relating to mental health across 11 academic disciplines around the world.
The resulting work concluded that the core elements of mental wellbeing should be summarised in terms of the following:
- Meaning and purpose
- Life satisfaction
- Self-acceptance
- Strong relationships
- Autonomy
- Happiness.
Factors such as income, housing and physical health, while important, were found to are drivers of wellbeing rather than defining features — a distinction that can help policymakers better understand where to focus interventions and investment.
The research has reinforced the key point that mental wellbeing is not the absence of mental illness, providing evidence for the value of greater emphasis on helping people to thrive, rather than only treating illness.
The next step will be applying the framework in real-world settings, with the potential to reshape how mental health is measured and supported worldwide. For example, the common definition can be used by employers to design targeted support programmes that contribute to wellbeing; and in education, schools can be guided to support children’s emotional development, with a greater focus on building resilience and connection from an early age.