In redefining health, I go beyond the dominant biomedical, reductionist and individual behavioural agency / person-centric view of health as normal baseline functioning, end-state absence of disease, risk mitigation and a resource for living.
Instead I define health as a whole affective capacity or power for creating desired valued and meaningful lived experiences expressed as a full expected life, bodily vitality and integrity, creativity, belonging and attachment, social purpose, human connection, connection with nature, play and freedom.
“A whole affective capacity or power for creating desired valued and meaningful lived experiences expressed as a full expected life, bodily vitality and integrity, creativity, belonging and attachment, social purpose, human connection, connection with nature, play and freedom”
In this perspectival relocation, health is no longer a separate object existing outside of our self-perception but rather is now brought fully into or inside our whole actual lived experience.
In this perspectival expansion, health is no longer seen as an objectified and quantified functional end in itself to be normalized or repaired but rather is viewed as a capacity to create and realize the desired, valued experiences we seek; a whole potential capacity for positive, normative striving in lived journeys of experience and a creational force for individual and collective being and becoming.
With this view of health as inside and whole to our experience, the freedoms, creations, belongings and connections that we seek, together with their absence and the forces enabling or preventing them become the objects of study, design, intervention and action.
Health has therefore moved firmly into the centre of our critical social science. Health is lived experience.
Chris Lawer, January 2021