Good medical habilitation and rehabilitation aims at achieving such positive health. The concern for positive health of the sort just described has been one of the central elements of research and public policy aimed at explaining, predicting, or improving the health of populations. List theories, in which well-being consists in meeting threshold levels of a disparate set of goods. Clinical Model: elimination of disease/ symptoms (being cured) Role Performance: does health interfere with the person's role/ job Adaptive Model; The idea that in order to be healthy one has to have the ability to adapt to the environment or disease. Recent psychological and philosophical work on happiness and well-being is also consistent with the notion of eudaimonistic health developed here. A unified and limited conception. One thing that remains so far unaddressed is an important question about happiness as a purely psychological, affective state.5 Philosophical accounts of well-being other than hedonism tend to deemphasize the intrinsic good of sensory pleasures and pains, somatic-affective feelings, passions, emotions, and moods. To dismiss happiness as a lightweight matter of little import is most likely to be working with a lightweight conception of happiness (123). Keyes makes a plausible case for the usefulness, and limitations, of such self-reported assessments as indicators of more objective determinations of individual well-being along these two dimensions. If not, then the conception of eudaimonistic health will not be sufficient for present meta-theoretical purposes. The same sort of interest in the topic, and ambivalence about it, can be found in contemporary psychology. The basic equipment for a moral life. This congruence between health and virtue comes in some measure from the fact that eudaimonistic theories have a wider conception of health than many of us now use, at least in health policy contexts. His conception of it is certainly not lightweight. Habilitation into basic health, covering both its physical and psychological factors, negatively and positively defined, will inevitably include habilitation for basic moral development. The social: the community, the presence or absence of relationships"We suffer when our interpersonal bonds are sundered and we feel solace when they are reestablished" (Engel, 1997) As noted earlier, ancient eudaimonistic sources sometimes do run the analogy between health and human flourishing all the way out to the vanishing point of perfection. Flourishing individuals exhibit high levels on at least one of the two measures of hedonic well-being, and high levels on at least six of the eleven measures of positive functioning (eudaimonistic well-being). Eudaimonistic Model - emphasizes on the interaction between physical, social psychological and spiritual aspects of life and environment that contribute to goal attainment and create meaning. Basic justice is about justifiable requirements, and using a eudaimonistic conception of health will not necessarily import a standard of perfect health into normative discussions about basic justice and health. A stable, favorable social environment. For that, one needs to achieve forms of health that are immune from or resistant to reversals, and resilient when immunity or resistance fails. Medical quackery and pseudoscience to prevent moral degeneracy in individuals is appalling enough when confined to the treatment of a few isolated individuals. Thus we wonder where to draw the line between reconstructive and cosmetic surgery; between legitimate and illegitimate strength training in sports; between ethically objectionable and unobjectionable performance enhancement for various occupations. The typical result is then that philosophical conceptions of happiness (even hedonistic ones) designed to answer those objections exclude strong and destabilizing affect; trivialize mild, transient affect; and endorse an inventory of well-modulated, stable, and controlled affective states (of both negative and positive sorts) that are compatible with psychological equilibrium and are subordinate to practical wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, and the other moral virtues. He calls his account the emotional state theory of happiness and is careful to describe it so as to avoid attempts to reduce it to one or another of the standard accounts of well-being, and at the same time to avoid a list of objections similar to the ones those accounts of affective well-being face. Merely being free of pathology leaves a person highly vulnerable to relapse. This chapter presents and discusses theoretical considerations and empirical findings regarding the concepts generalized resistance resources (GRRs) and generalized resistance deficits (GRDs). Eudaimonic well-being or eudaimonia is a concept of human flourishing that could have many positive implications for the practice of health promotion. The first principle defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The second principle asserts that the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being. And the sixth principle asserts that healthy development of the child is of basic importance; the ability to live harmoniously in a changing total environment is essential to such development.. The other is rehabilitative, by giving attention to the ways in which people with survivable injuries of these sorts can be restored. The habilitation framework requires the adoption of a notion of complete healththat is, a unified conception of good and bad health, along both physical and psychological dimensions, in a given physical and social environment. Strength, stability, and energy. The mood propensities relevant to happiness are forms of emotional resilience (or what I will later call homeostatic resilience): they dispose us to experience positive, rather than negative, central affective states (13338). And it is interesting, in this connection, that for many decades, behavioral science has been undermining some of the assumptions involved in preemptory rejection of the feel-good conception. They seem to run all the way through us, in some sense, feeling like states of us rather than impingements from without. Agency. So it seems clear that the habilitation framework offered in this book, along with its conception of eudaimonistic health, will need to be able to address questions of happiness in this ordinary senseone that emphasizes its affective dimension. This conception of health, while similar to a much-criticized definition offered by the World Health Organization, is distinct from it, and avoids the usual objections to the WHO definition. With the changing d. Models of Health: What does it mean to be healthy? Those matters concern the obvious, two-way causal connections between the absence of ill health and the presence of good healthgood health defined as various levels of strength, stability, resilience, and so forth. The Theory of Psychological Well-Being One of the most commonly used approaches to understanding happiness and well-being is the model of psychological well-being. For these reasons, choices A, C, and D would all be incorrect. (147). Sections 1 and 2 make that case, and note its connection to eudaimonistic ethical theory. Ancient Greek eudaimonists do not make a sharp distinction between psychological health and well-being, or between health defined negatively (as the absence of disease, deficit, or injury) and health defined positively (as the presence of stable, strong, and self-regulating traits that contribute to something more than mere survival). Except for the most strenuous Stoics, eudaimonists find much to admire and praise in such ordinary levels of virtue. A term borrowed from the World Health Organizations definition of health; it means here simply a unified account of health, including physiological, psychological, and social factors, along negative and positive dimensions, ranging over health-states from worst possible to best possible. Such agency, when it is healthy, may begin in infancy with largely egoistic agendas, but they are quickly coordinated with the demands of sociality. Psychic affirmation and psychic flourishing. I turn to those questions now. Does it simply mean not being sick, or does it mean more than that? The habilitation framework and its connection to health. These basic psychological nutrients are: Autonomy - the need to choose what one is doing, being an agent of one's own life. What is the model of health and wellness? Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity, in Michael Frede. The recent growth of positive psychology illustrates two things of particular interest here. Is the basic habilitative task for all of them related to health in some way? Haybron, in The Pursuit of Unhappiness, provides an illuminating philosophical analysis of a purely psychological account of happiness, meant to be faithful to its ordinary sense in which our emotional and affective states generally are given prominence. In the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology cited earlier, a good deal of this work is referenced by Corey L. M. Keyes, in the chapter called Toward a Science of Mental Health (Keyes, 2009, 8996). Keyes summarizes the research (some of it his own) on mental health conceived of as a constellation of dimensions of subjective well-being, specifically hedonic-eudaemonic measures of subjective well-being. He defines a mental health continuum ranging from languishing, through moderate mental health, to flourishing. Thus, in healthy adults, as health is understood in both contemporary psychology and eudaimonistic theory (though the jargon used varies from writer to writer), primal affect becomes emotion proper and is more or less successfully yoked to sociality and agency. After all, its connections to standard accounts, particularly eudaimonistic ones, are clear: the important emotional states are not only positive, but central rather than peripheral or superficial; those states are combined with mood propensities, all of which function together as positive psychological traits with considerable strength, stability, and resilience; and a preponderance of such strong, stable, and resilient positive traits is (plausibly) causally connected to sustaining both mental and physical health. For these reasons, choices A, C, and D would all be incorrect. A eudaimonistic conception of health is closely correlated on its positive side with contemporary psychologyboth with respect to psychopathology, where it is easiest to see, and with respect to at least some of the work on happiness and well-being (Keyes, 2009). As previously noted, it is clear enough that a eudaimonistic conception of health tracks a scientific conception of moral development that is (at a very basic level) common to plausible normative theories generally; it is not simply eudaimonism that recommends basic prosocial, cooperative, and productive traits and behaviors. That would lead one to believe that the books target is mental health rather than mental illness. The existing philosophical literature on the nature of happiness or a good life is replete with discussions that mention health in passing. Obvious objections to be met, again, include cases in which the desires might be inauthentic, self-defeating, not fully informed, not equivalent to rational need-satisfaction, or not congruent with basic justice. And in fact, work along these lines is going on. Think of attempts to give physiological, genetic, or evolutionary justifications for brutally repressive social policies with respect to sex, race, social status, poverty, and disability. But that is something the eudaimonistic tradition clearly acknowledges. Abstract Communities and populations are comprised of individuals and families who together affect the health of the community. In this viewpoint, health is a condition of actualiza- tion or realization of the person's potential. . Can we specify a basic level of health that will be the necessary basis for the full range of capabilities that might be required by any (normatively defensible) given conception of a good life? And in both contemporary psychology and eudaimonism, there is a close connection between healthy human development and basic character traits associated with virtue. On the one hand, the reference might mean only that health is to be defined positively as well as negatively, and that its sources are to be found along physiological and psychological dimensions, heavily influenced by socioeconomic circumstances.
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