Health and Well-Being
             :In subject area: Psychology
            
            The human–animal bond is defined today by the American Veterinary Medical 

             Association as “a mutually beneficial and dynamic relationship between

             people and other animals that is influenced by behaviors that are essential to the health and well-being of both.
            
            From: Encyclopedia of Mental Health (Third Edition), 2023'''

well-being

Ever since the WHO affirmation, the distinction between health and well-being has been under debate. Its critics have argued that health is a component of well-being, not identical to it, and that the WHO definition medicalized nonhealth elements of everyday life. The 1948 definition is said to have launched a lofty ideal, projecting health as an integral component of well-being and, furthermore, implying that good health is a necessary condition for attaining the highest possible levels in all other aspects of well-being (Salomon et al., 2003).


However, health is not the only outcome of interest. While the aim of conventional health care is to achieve health gains (or prevent deterioration), the focus of social care is to improve well-being. Elderly and disabled people are often supported by a combination of “conventional” health care and social care or long-term care (Coast et al., 2008). Here too, both physical and social well-being contribute to the QoL. Its perception seems to be captured by an instrument such as the quality of well-being scale, a preference-based measure combining three scales of functioning (physical activities, social activities, mobility) with a measure of symptoms and problems (Kaplan et al., 1979; Anderson et al., 1989). Given the descriptions of its attributes, however, it appears to be an instrument of HRQoL.


A similar argument has been put forward in the case of HRQoL, as viewed in terms of the contribution of an individual's health to his/her overall well-being. The conceptual problems emerge from the fact that well-being is not clearly separable into independent health and nonhealth components (Broome, 2002; De Charro, 2014).Military-to-civilian transition theories and frameworks David Pedlar, ... Carl Andrew Castro, in Military Veteran Reintegration, 2019

Well-being across the life course

There is no internationally accepted construct for defining “success” in life-course transitions. “Well-being” is a widely used concept for describing various states of human existence and often is cited as a key public policy objective (White, 2015). Etymologically, the compound word “well-being” is a noun originating in the 1610s when it arose from the adverb “well” and the noun function of the verb “be” (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.). The term therefore describes the state of “being” in the sense of existing and “well” in the sense of satisfactory, successful, sufficient, comfortable, or healthy. Good well-being is generally understood to be desirable, while poor well-being is not. A simple definition is not, however, readily operationalizable in programming and research, so a variety of well-being constructs (mental constructions derived from real-world observations) have evolved in psychology, sociology, and economics. Some are subjective, for example, when people are asked to describe their quality of life (psychological well-being), while others are objective, based on observing how people are doing, for example, measurements of income or the state of a community's economy.


In recent years, a number of superordinate, composite well-being constructs have been developed to assess well-being subjectively and objectively across multiple areas of life. Internationally, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) well-being framework recognizes 11 domains of individual well-being in two sectors: (1) quality of life (health status, work-life balance, education and skills, social connections, civic engagement and governance, environmental quality, personal security, subjective well-being) and material conditions (income and wealth, jobs and earnings, housing) and (2) well-being sustainability over time based on natural, economic, human, and social capital (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2013). In Canada, the Canadian Well-being Index accounts for the full range of social, health, environmental, and economic concerns of citizens in addition to national economic indicators and including the living standards of households, health, community vitality, democratic engagement, leisure and culture, time allocation, education, and the environment (Langlois, 2014). The First Nations Community Well-Being Index aggregated multiple indices across four dimensions of well-being: education, labor force participation and employment, income, and housing (Cooke, 2005). The UK national well-being framework, which was designed to inform development of statistical measures for the general population, took the view that individual subjective well-being was a key domain affected directly by the domains of social connections, health, work and leisure activities, residence, personal finance, and education/skills, and indirectly by the domains of societal governance, regional economy, and the natural environment (Beaumont, 2011).


In the United States, Robinson et al. (2017) proposed that successful MCT encompasses multiple dimensions of “wellness.” “Well-being” is used by Veterans Affairs Canada (Thompson, Sweet et al., 2016). There are no widely accepted definitions for these terms and, confusingly, they are often used interchangeably. However, a resolution for this confusion is emerging.


The superordinate, composite well-being construct developed by Veterans Affairs Canada and used as way to assess transition outcomes gathers all other well-being constructs, such as subjective psychological well-being, quality of life, and objective economic well-being into a superordinate construct (Thompson, MacLean et al., 2016). In this construct, well-being refers to how a person is doing subjectively and objectively in seven domains or key areas of life: employment or other purposeful activity, finances, health, life skills/preparation, social integration, housing/physical environment, and cultural/social environment (Fig. 3.2). Well-being is measured at each stage of life in each well-being domain on continua from poor to good (or worse to better) using subjective and objective descriptors (indicators) and fluctuates across the life course in response to determinants from all the other domains. The construct includes the classic determinants of health but accommodates bidirectional causal relationships between domains, as well-being in any one domain is influenced by determinants from it and all the other domains.

Chronic Stress and its Implications on Health Among Families of Children with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DD)

Nancy Miodrag, Robert M. Hodapp, in International Review of Research in Developmental Disabilities, 2011

1948, the World Health Organization defined health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Today, we continue to strive for this utopian state. Even as, in our modern world, everything seems more rushed and complicated, the ideal of well-being persists (The World Health Organization, 1948).


Reaching a state of healthy well-being may prove doubly hard when parenting a child with special needs. Characteristics of the child, of one's own feelings and expectations, and varying support systems (both formal and informal) all enter in. Other factors—including SES, race, and marital status—add yet another layer of complexity, and the contributions have yet to be determined of many child, parent, family, and support variables toward parental health and well-being. Still, one thing is clear: chronic stress has the ability to permeate various bodily systems and create a susceptibility to disease, illness, and poor health. Moreover, there seems to be a ripple effect, wherein chronic stress disturbs multiple systems causing more damage to overall health.


Parenting a child with an I/DD is no easy task. While countless joys emerge, the reality is that such parenting is demanding, with demands usually persisting across the lifespan. Yet when frequent activation of the stress response occurs, there is a cost to physical and mental health, a cost that parents of children with I/DD cannot afford. What bodily systems are affected, and in which particular ways and contexts? Ultimately, if we are to facilitate appropriate and timely interventions for those families most in need, then we must better understand the health effects of parenting the child with I/DD.