Keywords

South Australia has declared its vision to become the ‘State of Well-being’. If you ask most people what they want for themselves, or their loved ones, one answer rises to the top: a good life, happiness or well-being (Seligman et al. 2009). As such, one would imagine that the aims of the institutions in our life, such as schools, workplaces, and governments, would reflect this one sweeping desire.

However, governments traditionally use the gross domestic product as an indicator of its nations desires and performance, which Robert F Kennedy noted in 1968, measures everything except that which is worthwhile (Rogers 2012). Schools similarly focus on their student’s grades as both the objective and the measure of success, overlooking the many who fall away from the academic program or have non-academic interests. Institutions across the world are recognizing this disparity, and are seeking to correct it by measuring human well-being, which supports learning and a healthy and satisfying life (Rich 2014).

Professor Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, was invited to Adelaide, South Australia (SA), as a Thinker in Residence from 2012–2014. His key message was that well-being is measureable, teachable and learnable. Suddenly and decisively, using positive psychology knowledge and skills to build mental health seemed feasible and even sensible to the people of South Australia. A demand for well-being knowledge and services was born.

Martin Seligman proposed that SA had the potential and resources necessary to measure and build the well-being of its population at an unprecedented scale (Seligman 2013). The SAHMRI Wellbeing and Resilience Centre (WRC) was formed to drive this vision, and South Australia has become the first ever democratic political unit in the world to take a population health approach to measuring and building well-being and positive mental health (Seligman 2013). After all, as South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill says, “What else are we [the state government] striving for if not the well-being of all citizens?” (Weatherill 2015).

A state of well-being is one in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community (World Health Organization 2014).

So What Would a State of Well-Being Look Like?

The State of Well-being is a fractal, a repeating pattern of buidling well-being that displays at every scale. It is a political entity; it is a society; a community; it is a family, an individual and a state of mind. The State of Well-being is a society that understands that the well-being of children and young people is critical to underpinning a healthy and productive life for every person, everywhere.

A State of Well-being deeply considers the capacities for thinking and decision-making that sit within us, as we each, alone or together, navigate the future in uncertain and dynamic times. It is a society that treasures the development of healthy minds, and takes an interest in how we think as organizations, teams, groups and individuals, how we form ideas, manage ourselves and reach smart conclusions.

A State of Well-being gives rise to new ideas out of a growth mindset, resilient families and relationships out of emotional capital, new business opportunities out of perseverance, and a sense of meaning and purpose in work and life.

The Start Up

Delivering this ambitious yet extraordinary vision, as any complex task, has been divided into achievable parts. Building upon the expertise of Professor Seligman and other world leaders, the WRC established a strategic framework to approach this challenge: the ‘Lead, Measure, Build, Embed, Research’ model.

Lead

The WRC aims to introduce the language, concepts and knowledge within positive psychology and the sciences that sit behind it, to people in organizations, both public and private. When the language of everyday life begins to adopt the relatively new concepts of positive psychology, which tell us how to be well and resilient in the face of challenge and to seize opportunity in dynamic and uncertian situations, we enter the State of Well-being.

Measure

The WRC sees measuring and building well-being through the same lens of intent. We commit to measure well-being because we are committed to evidence-based action towards a result. The normal distribution of well-being in a population can be seen in Fig. 31.1. The WRC aims to form an accurate baseline of well-being in South Australia, and shift the curve towards a greater well-being in all of its citizens.

Fig. 31.1
figure 1

Normal distribution of psychological resources in a population and the effect of shifting the mean of the mental health spectrum (Adapted from Huppert 2009)

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The WRC has adopted a measurement tool from Seligman’s positive psychology framework called PERMA. It accurately combines both subjective and objective measures of well-being, and provides insight into the aspects of well-being requiring the most attention in an individual or group (Forgeard et al. 2011).

PERMA is based on a dashboard of five elements: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. High levels of each of the components of PERMA have been shown to protect against negative emotions (Garland et al. 2010), improve resilience, reduce depression, improve life satisfaction, protect against physical illness, and/or lower levels of stress (Seligman 2012). PERMA also cleanly explains the multi-dimensional aspects of well-being.

The WRC has added PLUS constructs to the PERMA measurement tool including resilience, optimism, physical activity, nutrition, and sleep to provide a more complete evaluation of individual and group well-being. Evidence supports the role of each of the PLUS items in building mental health assets and/or protecting against mental illness (Stranges et al. 2014; Carver and Connor-Smith 2010; Hillman and Lack 2013; Richardson et al. 2014; Waite and Richardson 2004).

With this tool, the WRC is creating an accurate baseline measurement of South Australia’s Well-being across the life course, to understand our well-being and to inform future decisions about what to do to shift the population curve in a positive direction. PERMA+ will become the ‘SLIP-SLOP-SLAP’ (the tag-line of the successful Australian skin cancer public health strategy) or the ‘5 WAYS TO WELLBEING’ (of the New Economics Foundation) of positive mental health; an accessible and marketable trademark to inspire real change throughout the population.

Build and Embed: Scale and Life Course

The build and embed aspects of the model refer to the delivery of well-being and resilience skills through targeted interventions, and an embedding of this new knowledge, based upon research, to drive a long-term cultural change and momentum for change towards psychological health, across the state.

The United States (US) Army is an example of a vast and complex structure in the world conducting large scale measuring and building of well-being and resilience (Harms et al. 2013) since 2008. Led by Brigadier General (Ret) Dr Rhonda Cornum, the US Army developed the Comprehensive Fitness Program (CSF) with the University of Pennsylvania, a resilience training program for soldiers and their families, using a train-the -trainer model, to measure and build the resilience skills required to cope both with trauma and life’s challenges (Harms et al. 2013).

Sharing a similar theoretical/research base, TechWerks LLC has developed a resilience skills program that is being delivered across the US Airforce and is now being offered in South Australia. It will form the initial scaffold of our developing wellbeing and resilience interventions, which are being rolled out across the state. Currently there are over $3m worth of investment in projects underway, with over 1,000 people trained in resilience skills.

“You don’t have to be born a certain way, you can actually learn those skills, doesn’t matter where you were educated or what your education level is, so at any level you can learn those skills and they will help you at life.” – Participant from Well-being Automotive project.

To inspire meaningful change in the well-being of the state, the WRC recognized the importance of implementing interventions across the life course starting with school children, disengaged teenagers, redundant factory workers, workforces generally and aged South Australians.

The positive education movement refers to the emerging trend of holistically applying positive psychology science to the entire school experience (Seligman et al. 2009). The South Australian Department for Education and Child Development is measuring the wellbeing of over 90% of public sector schools and the WRC is enagaging with many schools to achieve a whole school approach to building wellbeing, using the Lead, Measure, Build and Embed methodology.

Resilient Futures is a philanthropically funded program that will measure and build the resilience and well-being of 850 disengaged young people. This project will create new knowledge and new models of practice about building the well-being and resilience of young people who have dropped out of school, training, or work.

The exit of car manufacturing from Australia will result in an estimated 24,000 jobs lost in SA (Barbaro and Spoehr 2014). It is known that individuals who are more resilient have better coping skills and experience better outcomes following job loss (Gowan 2014). The WRC is currently working with employees from automotive supplier companies to measure and build well-being and resilience before they lose their jobs.

The Ageing and Well-being projects are providing individuals, organizations and communities with the PERMA+ framework and interventions to measure and build the Well-being of older people and to embed new practices which build well-being into thier lives.

Research

The State of Well-being Strategy will enable SA to lead the world in cohort research in how to measure and build well-being across the life course, and how to do it at the level of a state. This will be a unique body of research that has national and global relevance. As a part of the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, the WRC will also be developing projects to contribute to new research around the neurophysiological foundations of well-being.

With another ten research projects in the pipeline, the determination to build the State of well-being is growing in the political leadership and the public, private, and community sector in South Australia. Whether it is the 11-year-old schoolgirl who confidently states she has more PERMA, the 70-year-old man who says the “PERMA system” is helping him in his life or the 102-year-old woman who says the interventions have “changed her consciousness about her life”, the ‘lead, measure, build, embed, research’ framework is improving people’s well-being and resilience, while creating a prototype for the world.