ABSTRACT

The Routledge Handbook of Well-Being explores diverse conceptualisations of well-being, providing an overview of key issues and drawing attention to current debates and critiques. Taken as a whole, this important work offers new clarification of the widely used notion of well-being, focusing particularly on experiential perspectives.

Bringing together leading authors from around the world, Routledge Handbook of Well-Being reflects on:

  • What it is that is experienced by humans that can be called well-being.
  • What we know about how to understand it.
  • How well-being is manifested in human endeavours through a wide range of disciplines, including the arts.

This comprehensive reference work will provide an authoritative overview for students, practitioners, researchers and policy makers working in or concerned with well-being, health, illness and the relation between all three across a range of disciplines, from sociology, healthcare and economics to philosophy and the creative arts.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

part 1|86 pages

The human experience of well-being

chapter 2|11 pages

A sense of well-being

The anthropology of a first-person phenomenology

chapter 4|7 pages

Dwelling in the world with others as mortal beings

“Well-being” in post-disaster Japanese society

chapter 5|10 pages

Well-being and being-well

A Merleau-Pontian perspective on psychosomatic health

chapter 8|7 pages

Dwelling-mobility

An existential theory of well-being

part 2|140 pages

How are understandings of well-being developing? Disciplinary and professional perspectives

chapter 10|9 pages

Well-being and phenomenology

Lifeworld, natural attitude, homeworld and place

chapter 11|12 pages

Heritage and well-being

Therapeutic places, past and present

chapter 12|9 pages

Disability and ambiguities

Technological support in a disaster context

chapter 13|8 pages

The existential situation of the patient

Well-being and absence

chapter 17|9 pages

“What can’t be cured must be endured”

Living with Parkinson’s disease

chapter 19|7 pages

Agencies of well-being

chapter 20|13 pages

Embodied routes to well-being

Horses and young people

chapter 22|8 pages

Well-being and self-interest

Personal identity, Parfit, and conflicting attitudes to time in liberal theory and social policy

chapter 23|11 pages

Values-based practice

At home with our values

part 3|98 pages

How is well-being manifest in human life? The aesthetic nature of well-being

chapter 24|7 pages

Creativity and aesthetic thinking

Toward an aesthetics of well-being

chapter 25|19 pages

Collaborative drawings

Blue-prints of conversation dynamics

chapter 27|13 pages

Poetry and/as wellness

chapter 30|15 pages

Eighteen kinds of well-being although there may be many more

A conceptual framework illustrated with practical direction for caring