Wellbeing and its improvability as a national goal

Wellbeing has long been a discussion point for national policy when considering the impact of social and economic policy. Depending on ones professional outlook, however, we may all arrive at quite different connotations of what wellbeing actually reflects. Consequently, quite different interventions to wellbeing improvement may be considered. Traditionally defined in terms of economic growth and wealth accumulation, more recent wellbeing definitions have incorporated other objective and measurable social indicators including, but not limited to, health-care provision, education access, housing affordability and equality, which have been used to provide an objective measure of quality of life. In contrast, for others, questions of wellbeing relate specifically to the burden of disease and disability in a population, including psychiatric illness (e.g. affective disorders, dementias) and chronic disease (e.g. obesity, diabetes). However, as behavioural scientists, the authors of this chapter relate questions of wellbeing to the experiential and existential dimensions from which we interpret meaning from personal experiences. In this way, wellbeing relates to both objective and subjective dimensions of psychological functioning and feeling, often defined in terms of level of cognitive function, affect, motivation and even notions of spirituality.