Wellness Is More Than Physical Health
Medicine defines wellness as being healthy.
And it is.
Most people view wellness, or being well, as being physically healthy.
But wellness, in holistic terms, is actually more than that.
Consider that psychiatry is a branch of medicine.
Also consider that MD's who are not psychiatrists prescribe anti-depressants, sedatives, and sleep aids daily.
Since pain and disease effect the rest of life, wellness assumes physical health. Physical health is basic to wellness, and a given.
But wellness implies a fullness of life that goes beyond the physical. It is functioning as the human organism was meant to function on every level, and includes the mind and the spirit as well as the body.
Because wellness includes the mind and the spirit, wellness can be viewed in the light of Abraham Maslow, his needs hierarchy, and his study of psychological health.
It can also be viewed in the light of Carl Jung, and the quest for the spiritual in life that he found to be central to good health.
Maslow presents his well-considered hierarchy of needs as a preface to his study of psychological health and identifies the physiological or bodily needs as the most basic of all needs because a person who is starving or thirsty will have little inclination toward satisfying the higher needs for safety, love, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
However, what is apparent to anyone involved in health, or anyone who has spent time around a seriously ill person, is that the physically ill are often incapable of caring for themselves at even the most basic, physical level and that at the extreme, or close to it, may need to be provided with tubes for their nutrition and hydration, and even breathing and elimination.
Just as apparent is the fact that people in severe pain are incapable of enjoying wellness at almost any level, and sometimes even lose their spiritual awareness of life in their illness.
You probably know how hard it can be to function optimally with, say a headache, toothache, or upset stomach; yet for some, dealing with extreme pain, and their inability to reach anything beyond that pain, can lead to suicide.
For Maslow, wellness would culminate in what he termed self-actualization, that is, in a person being or becoming everything they could be. And since for Maslow, self-actualization was a study of psychological health, it assumes that the more basic needs, including the physiological or bodily needs have been met
Self actualization, as I suggest, would also assume physical heath and freedom from any overriding physical pain. It would also assume freedom from mental anguish.
If you read about, or have experienced, self-actualization, what's interesting about it is the feeling of wholeness, of well being, and even occasional euphoria that it can produce. It's something that is very hard to describe directly, though I have done it indirectly and have seen Andrew Greely also describe it indirectly in one of his novels, and Henry Thoreau do it in Walden.
Back in th early 1970's I knew hippie types who knew of Maslow but whose euphoria, such as it was, was drug induced and therefore not real because it was not self-sustaining and not derived from life being well lived. Many of them were also familiar with Thoreau but failed to see that his experiment at Walden Pond was all about life being well lived.
There were, and still are, people who deny or ignore their own physiological needs, as well as needs for safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization for the sake of a drug induced high. They are as far from the psychological health Maslow described as can be imagined.
All of us, for many reasons, can sometimes make wrong choices in our lives, but psychological health, as described by Maslow, was based on making good choices. His self-actualizing people were good choosers who, overall, made far better choices in their lives than the average member of society. I would suggest reading Motivation And Personality by Abraham H. Maslow for anyone interested in learning more about his study of psychological health.
Looking at Freud, Adler, and Jung, the three founders of the psychoanalytic movement and what has become psychiatry, you can see something of the progression in Maslow's need hierarchy among them with Freud at the physical level with his emphasis on sexuality, Adler beyond him with his emphasis on self-esteem, and Jung and the level of self-actualization with his emphasis on the spiritual or transcendent that leads to the feeling of wholeness or balance that Jung thought the healthy psyche needed.
© 2008 Lawrence Stepanowicz, ND