The politics of wellbeing Part 2: the role of wellbeing communities

National governments have an essential role to play in moving toward wellbeing societies, but many are instead caught up trying to maintain an unsustainable status quo defined by features such as corporate power, a neoliberal economy, socioeconomic inequalities, consumerism, and the toxic influence of digital media. A fundamental challenge of political change, prefiguring any specific policy position, goes to the underlying ideas and evidence which leaders use to define ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’. If the way a problem is defined is inadequate to the facts, chances are that the ‘solution’ adopted will be ineffective.

On questions of individual and societal health and wellbeing, there is a gaping hole in the way most governments are defining the issues for the purposes of social policy. In short, the missing piece begins with an understanding of core functions of social intelligence, include stress arousal, and how these support competent social behaviour. From there, one can then understand how and why certain social conditions cause chronic stress arousal, leading in turn to psychological distress and harmful social behaviours, and contributing to many common forms of mental and physical illness. The fact that stress arousal is a built-in feature of human social intelligence means that every person on the planet is vulnerable to chronic stress under certain conditions.

When these well-established scientific understandings are combined with evidence in public health, it becomes very clear that, notwithstanding their positive features, contemporary societies are creating conditions which: a) undermine capabilities for coping with stressors; and b) cause chronic stress for large parts of the population. Some of the intersecting societal features implicated in this process are: socioeconomic inequalities and poverty; financial, housing and employment insecurity; struggling parents and families; discrimination in various forms; social isolation; environmental damage; climate change and extreme weather; social media; and political/media strategies to provoke anxiety and cultivate social division. 

Our universal vulnerability to chronic stress and its diverse effects means that stressful social conditions can and do contribute to many social problems: health inequalities between groups; premature ageing; escalating levels of mental ill-health; harms to child development; burnout at work; unhealthy or addictive behaviours; domestic violence; suicidal thoughts; sexism and racism; and extremism. These harms in turn create additional demand and complexity for health and education services, and for society at large. In Australia, the economic costs of mental illness and suicide alone are estimated to be $70 billion per year. Clear and consistent evidence is available on the ways chronic stress causally contributes to all these issues. I have cited such evidence in work here, here, here and here.

Systems of medical care for prevention and treatment of disease are essential, but a narrow biomedical, ‘disease-and-treatment’ view of mental health is a major barrier to honest political and societal recognition of the social causes of chronic stress and its immense harmful effects on human psychology and behaviour. Despite growing expenditure on mental healthcare systems, this approach alone is showing no signs of actually reducing the scale of the problem.

Action on climate change is slow but at least there is a widely endorsed, evidence-based explanation of the causes of the problem, which advocates can use to devise and argue for meaningful solutions. Contrastingly, in social and health policy, while there is some welcome change afoot, for the most part we continue to define problems through a narrow biomedical lens, or the crude psychology of blaming ‘deficient’ people for their own problems and devising inadequate remedial ‘solutions’ accordingly.

If the institutions of government and public service are functioning without a working understanding of social intelligence and stress, the social causes of chronic stress, and its harmful effects, then their capacity to understand social problems and devise social policy solutions adequate to the facts is severely compromised.

So, if the above summation is accurate, what then does it say about action for progressive change towards a socially just and sustainable wellbeing society? What does it say to all those people who long for a fair, healthy and sustainable future for themselves and their children? Certainly, one part of the challenge is to continue doing what many progressive organisations are already doing, advocating for policy action on issues such as poverty, discrimination, housing insecurity, online harms, unemployment, oppression, or climate change and extreme weather. In the terms I’ve expressed, this is also in effect about reducing population exposures (and inequalities in exposures) to known causes of chronic stress.  Such organisations can strengthen their collective advocacy with clear theory and evidence on how exposure to such conditions causes chronic stress, contributing to mental and physical ill-health and compounding social problems with further harms, including intergenerational effects.

However, there is a whole ‘other side’ to theory and evidence on social intelligence, stress and social conditions, which is to describe the nature of psychological wellbeing, how it develops, and the conditions it needs to thrive. I define wellbeing in two parts as:

• The ability to self-regulate social cognition and behaviour to cope with minor stressors, avoid chronic stress, and engage in positive social relationships

• The ability to balance purposeful goal-directed action with other states of being, which reduce stress and enable self-awareness, calm, happiness, connection and meaning

This definition expands to encompass seven wellbeing abilities. The focus for policy makers must be on the essential conditions needed for these abilities to be developed in childhood and adolescence and exercised in adulthood, into the elder years (as we will come to below).

Once this view is placed in the foreground it exposes and underpins a whole ‘other side’ of potential action for social change toward a wellbeing society. The sense of wellbeing as a public issue expands beyond the problem of exposure to adverse conditions and the harms done, into the question of equitable access to the conditions needed for wellbeing, and the capabilities thereby created for positive societal contributions.

The conclusion to arise from this for progressive politics – discomfiting as it may be – is that forms of action to object to contemporary political decisions perpetuating inequality, injustice, discrimination, and so on, and demand measures to ‘meet the needs’ of groups most harmed by these conditions, while important, are on their own just not enough. Although the full arguments for such a conclusion are more than I want to attempt here, the basic reasons are simple enough. It is easy for governments to respond to this issue-based politics with a fragmented array of ad hoc policy ‘fixes’ which do not add up to systemic change, and do not challenge the underlying status quo. We know this is easy because we are witness to it every day.

The politics of protest, on its own, responds primarily to harms already caused and thus prompts remedial ‘solutions’ and marginalises attention on the necessary, more fundamental shift of social policy to an orientation of wellbeing promotion and primary prevention of social ‘problems’. The prospective benefits of such a shift for social and health services, for public expenditure savings, and for society at large can hardly be overstated, and besides, it really is the only sustainable choice available.

A politics of protest and demand to meet the needs of groups subject to disadvantage, discrimination and detriment has devolved into identify politics, without the accompanying balance of a universalist politics of wellbeing. Given the opportunity, contemporary political actors on the right or centre-left will be happy to go on filling this vacancy with self-serving assumptions about economic growth, investment, productivity, and consumer demand as proxy indicators of universal social welfare.

The wellbeing community

As to the question of what a politics and process of social change for wellbeing looks like, in general terms we have known the answer to that for a long time. As the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion stated the matter in 1986:

Health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life; where they learn, work, play and love … and by ensuring that the society one lives in creates conditions that allow the attainment of health by all its members.

Furthermore, we know that universal comprehensive primary health care (CPHC) covering primary medical care, disease prevention, and promotion of wellbeing, delivered within community settings is one of those key conditions. It includes the empowerment of communities in creating the conditions of their own wellbeing.

To strengthen and reanimate these definitions for today’s conditions I think it is useful to add contemporary evidence about social intelligence, stress, and psychological wellbeing, but the basic description of what to do remains the same. Thus, I argue that concerted action to support development of wellbeing communities must be a core element of political and social change toward wellbeing societies (but this does not remove the need for action by governments on broader social conditions).

Such action within communities – in all their various forms – to build supportive conditions for wellbeing within local spaces is already occurring in diverse ways but needs to be strengthened and expanded. In Australia, I see relevant ‘community scale’ actions for wellbeing underway everywhere I look, in families, neighbourhoods, workplaces, country towns, local government areas, health services, schools and so on. Some of these are likely more effective than others, no doubt, but all are trying to promote community wellbeing as a response to the harms being done by contemporary socioeconomic conditions.

There are many forms of action which can contribute to the development of wellbeing communities. Where multiple forms of practice combine, the benefits are likely to become cumulative and mutually reinforcing. Here are some of the key areas where effective action can be taken, with embedded links to already-existing examples: parenting and early child development, healthy urban design, comprehensive primary health care, land care or urban greening, building social connections, access to meaningful work, strengthening local economies, and healthy food. ‘Wellbeing community’ is deliberately recommended as a holistic concept encompassing multiple forms of activity.

This is not the aspiration of some on the political right to create little middle-class utopias free of any government ‘interference’. On the contrary, publicly funded social services including CPHC and schools have a vital role to play. The difference is that they do not merely deliver ‘episodes’ of primary medical care or formal teaching but also engage with and support local organisations and community members as active agents in choosing and carrying out wellbeing strategies. Local governments also have a crucial role to play in building wellbeing communities and the work of many such organisations already reflects this orientation to one extent or another. Again, there is important scope for such actions to be improved and expanded.

Aboriginal community-controlled health services in Australia are a leading example of community-based CPHC directed toward a holistic view of human wellbeing and have many lessons to offer.     

The many examples of action for wellbeing communities are to be celebrated and show what is possible, but significant obstacles remain. In many communities, relevant actions may be hampered by limited resources, occur fragmentedly, or only for a limited time. While community-member involvement is essential, reliance on volunteer power alone is hard to sustain. The social and economic resources different communities can draw on to implement wellbeing strategies are far from equal. Australian governments are still building low-density, car-dependent, energy-intensive, low-income suburbs on the fringes of major cities, creating the conditions for ill-being rather than wellbeing.

Considering such barriers, I think the many forms of localised action for community wellbeing need to become more conscious of themselves as a movement of sorts, sharing common interests, and building capacity to represent these interests collectively to governments. Alongside the role of local governments or other organisations, political leadership for wellbeing communities needs to grow bottom-up from communities themselves. Part of the challenge of bottom-up activism for wellbeing communities is to demand public resources to support their efforts. This is where localised action links to political advocacy directed toward government decision makers. Localised actions for wellbeing can be strengthened with educative strategies to build understanding of what wellbeing is and how it is shaped by social, economic and environmental conditions.

Together with efforts to oppose the various failings of contemporary politics, people of goodwill should strongly consider giving effort and time to actions to promote wellbeing within their community of choice. Such actions will not easily undo the effects of decades of policy neglect, but they will show the way to what is possible for a society worth living in. It is wisely observed that governments tend to follow social change rather than lead it. This suggests that, as the scale and coherence of a wellbeing community movement grows, the demand on policy makers for substantive policy change will become more compelling.

Community Wellbeing Workshops

Building on my book on How to Create Societies for Human Wellbeing and other research, I am offering new half- and one-day workshops on Creating Wellbeing Communities. These workshops are suitable for social policy agencies, Primary Health Networks, Local Governments, or community-based organisations interested in promoting wellbeing more effectively within their community.

The workshops cover:

• Foundational concepts: understanding social intelligence, stress, and psychological wellbeing

• Reflection and issue mapping: identifying community strengths and areas for improvement

• Options for action: defining practical strategies and ways of working suited to your community

For more information and contact details to discuss your ideas and needs, please visit my website here.