Concepts of health and wellbeing

For a long time, people treated 'health' as a simple idea: if you were not sick, you were healthy. The World Health Organization (WHO) rejected that narrow view in 1946, describing health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. In VCE Health and Human Development the term health and wellbeing is used as a single idea.

Health refers to the state of a person's physical, social, emotional, mental and spiritual existence, and wellbeing is the sense of feeling well and being satisfied with that state. Both change constantly, so health and wellbeing is dynamic: a person can feel fantastic on Monday, catch a virus on Tuesday and feel miserable by Wednesday.

The course breaks health and wellbeing into five dimensions. You must be able to explain each one and give an example of what 'optimal' looks like.

• Physical: the functioning of the body and its systems, including fitness, energy levels, body weight, freedom from illness and injury, and the ability to carry out daily tasks.
• Social: the ability to form and keep meaningful relationships, manage or adapt to different social situations, and have a supportive network of family and friends.
• Emotional: the ability to recognise, express and manage a full range of emotions in a positive way, and to show resilience when things go wrong.
• Mental: the current state of the mind or brain, covering the ability to think, process information, solve problems and form opinions. Low stress and high self-esteem and confidence point to optimal mental health and wellbeing.
• Spiritual: ideas, beliefs and values that give meaning and purpose to life. This can involve religion, but it also includes a sense of belonging, connection to the land or a community, and a personal set of values.

A common error is mixing up emotional and mental. A useful test: emotional is about feelings (recognising sadness, expressing joy, bouncing back from disappointment), while mental is about thinking (concentration, decision-making, stress levels, self-esteem).

The dimensions are interrelated. A change in one dimension usually flows into the others. Breaking a leg (physical) can stop a teenager from playing in their netball team, cutting off contact with friends (social), which may lead to feelings of loneliness (emotional) and to worry about falling behind (mental).

Health and wellbeing is also subjective. 'Subjective' means it depends on the opinions, experiences and values of the person judging it. Two people with the same medical condition can rate their health very differently: a 70-year-old with arthritis might call herself healthy because she can still garden and see her grandchildren, while a 17-year-old athlete with a mild cold might feel unhealthy because he cannot train.

Age, culture, past experience, gender, religion and the media all shape what a person counts as 'healthy'. Because it is subjective, there is no single correct interpretation, which is why the course asks you to describe and analyse different perspectives.