Wellbeing, resilience and peer support

 

The idea of Wellbeing can mean many different things, covering elements of mental, emotional, physical, social and societal functions. Whatever your definition, it’s worth looking after.

 

So, how can you do that exactly?

 

In todays episode, we hear from  Dr Dianne Wepa, Associate Professor at Charles Darwin University in Australia, and Prof Haaken Strand of the Charles Darwin University Faculty of Health. They discuss what is meant by wellbeing in different cultures, and when facing different challenges, be they personal, professional, or global.

 

Read the original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnsa.2023.100144

 

Image Source: Adobe Stock Images / Hatia

 

 

Transcript:

 

The following transcript is automatically generated

00:00:04 Will Mountford

Hello and will welcome to researchpod

00:00:07 Will Mountford

The idea of well-being can mean many different things, covering elements of mental, emotional, physical, social and societal functions. Whatever your definition, it’s worth looking after. So how can you do that exactly?

00:00:22 Will Mountford

In today’s episode, we hear from Doctor Dianne Wepa, associate professor at Charles Darwin University in Australia, and Professor Haaken Strand of the Charles Darwin University Faculty of Health. They discuss what is meant by well-being in different cultures and when facing different challenges, be they personal, professional or global.

00:00:44 Will Mountford

And joining me to discuss their work, Doctor Diane Wepa and Professor Haaken Strand. Good morning to the both of you.

00:00:50 Dr Dianne Wepa

Good morning.

00:00:51 Prof Haaken Strand

Good morning.

00:00:52 Will Mountford

For a little bit of background to the listeners and for my own self as well. If you could start us off by talking about some of the definitions of terms, what we’re going to be talking about today is well-being, which a lot of people may have heard about in general, pop psychology senses what are the bounds of well-being in a research sense in terms of today’s discussion.

00:01:12 Prof Haaken Strand

Well-being has multiple definitions. That’s not one uniform. well-being over the whole world, so to say we have World Health Organization has come up with one definition which then has moved around a little bit between different countries, even UK and Australia has different definition. It’s well-being for you.

00:01:32 Prof Haaken Strand

And not the well-being for me in Australia, which is kind of interesting in itself.

00:01:37 Prof Haaken Strand

But it normally stays about the well-being the main companies. It’s quite generic and come through in different countries. It’s the physical, the mental, the emotional, the social health and quite often also involves the occupational. That’s the main aim of the well-being. So the definition is.

00:01:57 Prof Haaken Strand

Diverse between different cancers and also some countries includes environment, workplace and it’s a lot of.

00:02:04 Prof Haaken Strand

Aspect of the physical and mental and emotional and social goes through in all definitions. So I think that’s the really main thing and they also get quite closely connect the quality of life.

00:02:16 Prof Haaken Strand

You can say well-being equal to life goes hand in hand a little bit. That’s one definition called happy and prosperous. That’s come back to quality of life as well. But that’s pretty much what it sits today in the.

00:02:26 Prof Haaken Strand

Well-being and as I said, there’s not.

00:02:28 Prof Haaken Strand

One unifying definition, unfortunately, or interesting.

00:02:34 Dr Dianne Wepa

I absolutely agree, and in some countries, say, like New Zealand, where I originate from cultural and spiritual well-being has been added to the World Health Organization definition. So it does vary, I agree.

00:02:49 Will Mountford

Well, then that raises the question of in terms of the research that you guys are doing, how do you capture that data if we want to say that people are improving, well-being or measuring well-being in certain circumstances against another with the nebulous definitions and constraints placed upon it, is it all just a matter of qualitative?

00:03:10 Will Mountford

Coding and qualitative research and then coding that into numerical data. Or what’s your kind of general methodology for this big weird fuzzy area?

00:03:22 Prof Haaken Strand

It’s very common in my own case. For example use mixed method when you use both quantity and quality. If you can pull sample, have the quantity part can be one of the quality of life tools. There’s not so many tools developed yet for measuring of well-being. Quantitatively you can use as quality of life because physical and mental health comes out in 2 domains.

00:03:43 Prof Haaken Strand

Of quality of life that and relates to well-being. So if you do the quantitative quality of life and then you interview in focus individual or something to get qualitative data about people experience as well-being that can differ again you can still have thematic analysis then in the different components of well-being later on.

00:04:01 Will Mountford

And for areas around well-being, when that well-being starts veering out of being, well, how do you then come up with definitions of different states of being unwell or resistance, resilience to challenges?

00:04:16 Prof Haaken Strand

Again, that’s very much into the specific person or individual. Some people can have low physical mental health but still have good well-being because they have lived with the chronic disease for a long time, for example, and adapt to that kind of life. But I.

00:04:31 Prof Haaken Strand

We go. Oh, poor person. Have this to see us, much be terrible. But you have lived with that for 1015 years. You have most likely adapt. You loved to that life situation and you feel happier, prosperous in that situation because you have adapted how life sent around it and therefore you still have well-being referred to some definitions. well-being is a difficult term.

00:04:51 Prof Haaken Strand

To book seen and measured because of that, because it’s so individual, we experience well-being and we’ll put into the world of well.

00:04:59 Prof Haaken Strand

And as Diane mentioned.

00:05:00 Prof Haaken Strand

The cultural aspect is very big as well.

00:05:03 Dr Dianne Wepa

I agree, and if you look at the seminal work of Kubla Ross around stages of dying and dealing with grief, she even talks about having a good death. And so you could be dying, but still feel a level of well-being. So sometimes we think about well-being. Is it freedom towards well-being?

00:05:22 Dr Dianne Wepa

Or freedom from pain. And so unpacking even that it’s not just a state of homeostasis is.

00:05:29 Dr Dianne Wepa

It there’s just so many variables so different authors have a different take on it in terms of ages and stages.

00:05:36 Prof Haaken Strand

I started my Reese’s area from Bandura’s theory of self efficacy that then feed seem to self management that Laurie Wagner Bodenheimer have developed further models of self management. And if you have self management for some with chronic disease for chronic conditions then that can increase their well-being. That is the correlation I refer to the quality of life and well-being.

00:05:58 Prof Haaken Strand

In my recent use, quality of life and different model of chaos and then how patient and when indeed and how they experience the well-being and how, if they were controlling.

00:06:07 Prof Haaken Strand

The disease or the?

00:06:08 Prof Haaken Strand

Disease Control them, for example, they come into the occupational part or the social, emotional part of their well-being and quality.

00:06:15 Prof Haaken Strand

I’ve I find that very interesting aspect of well-being as a healthcare professional, how we can support patients, persons, individuals.

00:06:24 Prof Haaken Strand

To live with their disease and adapt their life to their disease or their condition.

00:06:29 Dr Dianne Wepa

Today we hear about resilience, don’t we? And certain people are more resilient than others, especially with the pandemics that we’ve had. And I was looking at the older literature from Michael Rutter in 1991.

00:06:42 Dr Dianne Wepa

And he wrote, especially in terms of children, the term, because social works, my background there used to be a term called invulnerable children. And over time the term got replaced with resilience. And I thought, isn’t that interesting when we look at the discourse around, you know, the words that define people’s behaviours.

00:07:01 Dr Dianne Wepa

An experience. And so I thought, well, that would be interesting to discuss because when we look at the notion of resilience, it tends to be around absolute resistance to damage.

00:07:13 Dr Dianne Wepa

If you look at.

00:07:13 Dr Dianne Wepa

In a purest way of looking at it, but in reality, no one has absolute resistance. Rather, it’s more appropriate to consider susceptibility to stress as a graded phenomena, and I think when we look at it over time, even the history of the term resilience and the studies that have occurred as well.

00:07:34 Dr Dianne Wepa

We need to look at. There’s no single answer to life’s problems, and it really does depend on the context and the time that something has occurred to someone, because all the literature says, you know, you have twin studies and then, for example, and then one person will respond.

00:07:50 Dr Dianne Wepa

To another, depending on their internal reactions as well. So psychology has done a lot of work in terms of resilience and exposure to risk, and so do we look at avoidance of an event or especially in medicine in terms of infections and resilience in that pure medical way of.

00:08:08 Dr Dianne Wepa

Looking at it.

00:08:09 Dr Dianne Wepa

Or do we look at exposure over time to a pathogen and so in terms of social sciences, is it regular exposure to some sort of event or experience that perhaps develops resilience over time?

00:08:24 Will Mountford

Well, I’d say that the last couple of years have been a big case study for the entire world with some of that chronic exposure, as you’ve mentioned from the pandemics and stresses of modern life onwards, not going to draw attention to any one event since 2020 because the events keep happening and we’d like this to be as untime bound a podcast.

00:08:44 Will Mountford

It’s possible, but boy howdy, the events. So in terms of the scale of those challenges from the individual to the Community to society to the globe, how can we see short term challenges on those different levels of severity to an individual or?

00:09:03 Will Mountford

Or like I say, extrapolating out across many, many, many billions of individuals.

00:09:09 Prof Haaken Strand

Become quite apparent, especially during the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, when one-dimensional well-being, is occupational and environmental, and because of the environment, you couldn’t leave your house for example, or you couldn’t travel, you couldn’t occupation, move around how you want it. And people are very locked up and closed in and.

00:09:29 Prof Haaken Strand

Boosting, so to say and they lost their freedom and that reduced the well-being for number of people and put a lot of psychological stress and mental and well as well because of that.

00:09:40 Prof Haaken Strand

Think they’re occupational or movement? Physical. well-being as a result of the environment you live in is very important as well.

00:09:49 Dr Dianne Wepa

The protective influences may actually stem from early childhood experiences, and I think that just reflecting on my own upbringing, because I’m a generation X person and we were.

00:10:02 Dr Dianne Wepa

And, you know, anecdotally to be left alone a lot to our own devices and you know, if you hurt yourself, the parents didn’t, I wouldn’t say not care, but you were, you were kind of built resilience over time because you had to, you know, cope. And so I think there’s something around our early childhood experiences being exposed to risk which actually develops.

00:10:23 Dr Dianne Wepa

Protective factors, overtime and so linking back to chronic illness or disease, I think that resonates, doesn’t it, that you’re exposed to something over time, but that doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing. Because as say, if you’re in a a low income area and that may be very dangerous and you have to move neighbourhood to.

00:10:40 Dr Dianne Wepa

Keep your yourself and your family safe. It may be that you’ve developed resilience because you’ve moved, but it doesn’t account for the societal factors of low income and cost of living crisis and and those sorts of things. And so with the Christchurch earthquake and the shootings that occurred in my country in New Zealand, there was some study on resilience and how people.

00:11:02 Dr Dianne Wepa

Responded and there was what was called the there was a university student that got the student army rallied to help people with the earthquakes in particular. However, when you go to other countries where perhaps there isn’t that strong sense of community, the response is not as effective or instant. And people look to government or outside countries to.

00:11:22 Dr Dianne Wepa

Provide assistance.

00:11:24 Prof Haaken Strand

You think we’ve seen it in other kind of nature catastrophic situation in Australia?

00:11:29 Prof Haaken Strand

As well with all the.

00:11:31 Prof Haaken Strand

We’ve got our flags here, floods or big forest fires, and how people just get together and help each other and support each other. I live through the flood in Brisbane in 2011 and suddenly have all these volunteers coming in and help to clean up the streets and remove garbage. And that was it and that’s impact the environment you’re living in.

00:11:50 Prof Haaken Strand

And you feel that support the spiritual inspiration from other people, and that’s psychological support is very important for the well-being in that.

00:11:59 Dr Dianne Wepa

And so is that the question then comes up in terms of research like is there a trade off between resilience and well-being? Can you be poor and unwell but resilient? And so, you know, there’s sort of an interesting research question as well. The connection between the trade off.

00:12:15 Prof Haaken Strand

What I think should be really.

00:12:17 Prof Haaken Strand

Really terrible life situation for example.

00:12:19 Prof Haaken Strand

Someone who lives in that environment all the time, they have war going on, they have no money.

00:12:25 Prof Haaken Strand

Very little food, but after.

00:12:26 Prof Haaken Strand

Three months, three years, they would used to live with that. So they learn how to.

00:12:32 Prof Haaken Strand

With resilience to that love situation and still maybe all positive.

00:12:35 Prof Haaken Strand

Maybe not so.

00:12:36 Prof Haaken Strand

Prosperous, but they can be positive still. Well, they experience.

00:12:40 Prof Haaken Strand

Good well-being.

00:12:41 Dr Dianne Wepa

And there’s a a study that was done in Japan on patients with type one diabetes. And the researchers there created what was called functional perpet.

00:12:52 Dr Dianne Wepa

True resilience and that emerged as a concept where patients progress through the five stages of developing resilience to face adversity. So it’s interesting when you do look at perhaps quite cohesive societies like Japan, where the type one diabetes is interpreted to be something that you have to.

00:13:12 Dr Dianne Wepa

Function through would you have any comments on that hawkin coming from your background?

00:13:18 Prof Haaken Strand

I haven’t looked so much on that continent another 1020 years ago, they didn’t hardly had any diabetes in Japan and then they started getting more western food and western lifestyle. And the diabetes came along. But those things, they are very much you’re not supposed to.

00:13:34 Prof Haaken Strand

Bother anyone else, you have to just live with your situation and be happy with that. It’s their culture, kind of spiritual environment, they.

00:13:42 Prof Haaken Strand

Thing in.

00:13:43 Prof Haaken Strand

But that’s the only comment I have.

00:13:44 Prof Haaken Strand

In that specific area.

00:13:47 Will Mountford

Early mentioned there that someone in a natural disaster or war that after three six months.

00:13:52 Will Mountford

They will have.

00:13:53 Will Mountford

A kind of a live with it approach. A management does that then affect the ongoing psychological well-being in terms of what we might call today, post traumatic stress disorder.

00:14:06 Prof Haaken Strand

I will argue that they have an ongoing unwellness, but with quarterly with PTSD we quite often don’t see it until they change the environment and go back to normal social life. If you call it that from a war zone, the armed defense.

00:14:23 Prof Haaken Strand

Force or something?

00:14:23 Prof Haaken Strand

Like that and they go back to see the life, then the peak.

00:14:26 Prof Haaken Strand

The heater, because the environment is not there to support around them, has changed, so therefore the pitch they come up to the surface and hit them.

00:14:36 Prof Haaken Strand

And quite often hit their emotional more than the physical side of them. But I think the environment has a big impact environment, such as the social support around them, so not the geographic environment, more the social environment they’re living in there to support with people with the same experience, they have something in common that put them together and.

00:14:56 Prof Haaken Strand

They belong somewhere and they can support each other and therefore increase the well-being while they are in that social situation.

00:15:04 Dr Dianne Wepa

And that leads nicely to what are the protective factors that seem to support some people to respond differently? And quite an old study, Jenkins and Smith, 1990, they found that children were protected by a good relationship with one parent when the family as a whole was characterized by overall discord. And so they looked at quite dysfunctional families where they have been alcohol, drugs or.

00:15:27 Dr Dianne Wepa

Disharmony. And so we know, even anecdotal. You know, if you have one adult, even if it’s not the parent, maybe it’s a teacher or someone that you can connect with. There’s more of a likelihood that increases your protective factors in terms of your.

00:15:42 Dr Dianne Wepa

Response. Yeah. So it’s a lot of it comes back to your early age, isn’t it? The formative years on?

00:15:46 Dr Dianne Wepa

How you were exposed to certain conditions?

00:15:57 Will Mountford

That leads on to the concept of resilience and resistance. Having a I think.

00:16:04 Will Mountford

It’s quite a.

00:16:05 Will Mountford

Modern framing, but it might be there’s an old way of thinking about it that I’m unaware of. To borrow from a book about economics.

00:16:11 Will Mountford

The phrase of antifragile that rather than resisting stressor or resisting a challenge and continuing with.

00:16:19 Will Mountford

The system or state that you were in before that there is a healing and an evolution that can be strengthened by challenges to enhance and develop a stronger system so that future challenges are met without kind of just wearing away at the same stock of resistance. But to be stronger and more adept and more adept at dealing with it.

00:16:40 Will Mountford

Is there anything like that in terms of Wellness and well-being and psychological development?

00:16:46 Dr Dianne Wepa

Sometimes we just focus too much on one event of what’s happened then, rather than perhaps the lifespan approach of, say, an individual and the processes that they went through to respond early in life and then in the future as well. So so it does become a little bit more complex than one thing, and that’s just from a psychological.

00:17:07 Dr Dianne Wepa

View Yeah, it’s looking at the literature where it says protection does not reside in the psychological chemistry of the moments.

00:17:15 Dr Dianne Wepa

Readiness, but rather in the ways in which people deal with life changes and what they do about their stressful or disadvantaging circumstances. So in that connection, particular attention needs to be paid to the mechanisms underlying developmental processes that enhance people’s ability to cope effectively with future stress.

00:17:35 Dr Dianne Wepa

And adversity, like you say, and those that enable people to overcome.

00:17:39 Dr Dianne Wepa

Passed psychosocial.

00:17:41 Dr Dianne Wepa

Hazards. So we have an appreciation of indicators of risk and protective factors and we have little understanding of the processes. They seem to reflect, but substantially less knowledge about how to influence those processes in order to increase resilience. And that also goes into the research I’m doing with the midwifery students.

00:18:02 Dr Dianne Wepa

So I’m working with a PhD student at the University of South Australia and we have a research.

00:18:07 Dr Dianne Wepa

Team and she’s a a midwife and she felt that when she was a midwifery student, there was a lot of bullying that occurred towards midwifery students by the midwives. And she thought, well, I need to have a look at that. And so she’s doing her research now and she’s saying globally, that’s actually something that happens a lot. And but we’re free.

00:18:27 Dr Dianne Wepa

In terms of bullying and violence, and students are most vulnerable, as you would expect, because they are students, they have less.

00:18:34 Dr Dianne Wepa

Power and what then happens is the students perpetuate the cycle of violence to quote UN quote, fit in when they do secure their jobs. And so we’ve done what’s called an integrated review. It’s a type of literature review where we looked at comparing different universities and it highlighted the importance.

00:18:55 Dr Dianne Wepa

Of actually including the component in their undergraduate degree on bullying like the reality.

00:19:02 Dr Dianne Wepa

Of the workplace and there could be controversial as well because you might say, well, you need to leave that to the workplace. That’s not the university’s role on dealing with the nuances of the workplace, and not every workplace involves bullying. So that’s where we’re at at the moment with that PhD project for with her is to really.

00:19:22 Dr Dianne Wepa

Name it and lean in towards the evidence that is saying this is a problem in the midwifery profession. I’m not sure hawkin. If you want to comment on that for nursing.

00:19:33 Prof Haaken Strand

Unfortunately, we have definitely the same problem in nursing on international level. It does matter from country to country and it’s called horizontal bullying or horizontal violence, where the more senior nurse always try to put down.

00:19:48 Prof Haaken Strand

More you near 1.

00:19:50 Prof Haaken Strand

Cause I had a rough time. You must have.

00:19:52 Prof Haaken Strand

A rough time and we have seen it.

00:19:53 Prof Haaken Strand

For those decades, it’s not a new phenomena. It’s new because we now start to look into it and admit that it’s there and it’s terrible. It’s there because it shouldn’t be there. We should be able to be supporting each other and work together as.

00:20:08 Prof Haaken Strand

One profession so to.

00:20:09 Prof Haaken Strand

Say, but we still have this.

00:20:10 Prof Haaken Strand

Struggle with the in the professional, so it’s common in the nursing side as well. On the international level.

00:20:16 Will Mountford

What you mentioned there the phrase of I had a rough time. So you had a.

00:20:19 Will Mountford

Rough time that seems to be kind of the.

00:20:21 Will Mountford

Psychology at the core.

00:20:23 Will Mountford

Of power struggle, power dynamics, and self assertion that as a new parent I have heard a lot from previous generation advocated for that perpetuity of violence. This is just how it is.

00:20:37 Will Mountford

So do you see that transferring outside of the professional world, either in literature or in any other academic experience, that there is just?

00:20:45 Will Mountford

However, I had it, you must have it at least as bad. Rather than trying to make it better, or at least as good.

00:20:52 Prof Haaken Strand

And I think as we mentioned, how?

00:20:55 Prof Haaken Strand

Power struggle. If I have worked hard to get this level, you have to earn your stripes as well. You don’t get them for free. You have to go to university. You get the stripe, you have to earn your stripes as well.

00:21:06 Prof Haaken Strand

So you have to kind.

00:21:07 Prof Haaken Strand

Of prove yourself for people in the workplace, unfortunately.

00:21:11 Prof Haaken Strand

And it’s not unfortunate, not too much richer than this. There’s some reason, but there’s not too much.

00:21:17 Prof Haaken Strand

Because it’s such a.

00:21:19 Prof Haaken Strand

Sensitive area, so people haven’t really want.

00:21:21 Prof Haaken Strand

To partake in it.

00:21:23 Prof Haaken Strand

And it’s also difficult to get ethics approval through.

00:21:26 Prof Haaken Strand

Look into violence is not that easy either. Sometimes and then recruit participants is very difficult.

00:21:32 Dr Dianne Wepa

And the study I’m doing with the midwifery students, I agree we had to go to two ethics committees to two different universities with two degrees in midwifery. And so it wasn’t easy. Yeah, there was a lot of effort.

00:21:45 Dr Dianne Wepa

Call concerns that maybe it would traumatise students to talk about the bullying and you had to ensure, yeah, they had counselling, support services and yeah, so there’s there’s a lot and I think the good thing I like about this research is it’s like I said, it’s naming it. It’s saying it’s happening and rather than, you know, the custom and tradition of.

00:22:05 Dr Dianne Wepa

Suck it up. That’s just life.

00:22:07 Dr Dianne Wepa

And trying to provide a solution in terms of their degree. So have something in their and I think in terms of like education in general, say at the high school level, I think the world real world type of learning probably could permeate right through the education system around these real world ways that we need to communicate.

00:22:28 Dr Dianne Wepa

Better with each other.

00:22:29 Dr Dianne Wepa

Yeah. And I think bullying was probably always there, but now we have technology you can bully someone online.

00:22:37 Dr Dianne Wepa

Easy. A keyboard warriors, that kind of thing. So maybe it could be. We could say every generation has said that’s there, but the instances are counted more. Perhaps now that we have technology to say it’s happening.

00:22:49 Will Mountford

You are both colleagues working in Australian universities and across New Zealand.

00:22:55 Will Mountford

Well, but I think it is interesting to talk about different cultural responses. You’ve mentioned Japan and the Australian response to fires and floods.

00:23:04 Will Mountford

So I wonder if I could ask you both to maybe reflect on how there is.

00:23:07 Will Mountford

Any cultural difference in how you as people, not just as researchers but as members of those communities in Australia and New Zealand in global research, feel about how.

00:23:21 Will Mountford

Your cultural background informs your research and involves your participation in your community, in your local environment.

00:23:30 Dr Dianne Wepa

The cultural lenses coming through more and more now and challenging the traditional sort of western definitions of of a lot of these concepts that are to do with human beings and experience. And I think the focus culturally for me anyway, tends to be on the literature, seems to be on.

00:23:50 Dr Dianne Wepa

Being able to cope with and overcome difficulties and become strengthened by these difficulties, that seems to be the overall agreement in the literature.

00:24:01 Dr Dianne Wepa

And there seems to be a lack of focus around the protective factors that, like I said, from early childhood, you know, what is it that makes that person more resilient than another? And internationally, there’s a concept called we dentity. So you have identity and a lot of traditional cultures focus on we dentity. So I’ve written a lot on that and people go, oh, that’s an interesting.

00:24:24 Dr Dianne Wepa

And it’s basically the collective orientation of a lot of traditional cultures where in the language you may say so tell me about your experiences.

00:24:33 Dr Dianne Wepa

With the earthquake.

00:24:35 Dr Dianne Wepa

And, umm, someone from a kinship based culture pretty much automatically says oh, we well, we did this and we did that. So that tells you straight away their collective orientation and their way of being and doing they they may not say I. And so from that collective form of identity, if you like, you can actually see there’s nuances, there’s signposts.

00:24:57 Dr Dianne Wepa

Say ohh OK.

00:25:00 Dr Dianne Wepa

Coming together as a cultural group, as the norm, perhaps for that person. And so those sorts of cultures, there’s probably more of a cultural response and a collective response to adversity as opposed to, say, other cultures that it’s very much the individual. So I think there’s something in that space that we could look at.

00:25:18 Dr Dianne Wepa

More in terms of?

00:25:19 Dr Dianne Wepa

Response and resilience as a concept in terms of collective cultures response like the Japanese one. That’s a good example which is very homogeneous culture and they would lean towards the collective as we know with business and everything else that that’s done. You know in in that culture. So I think there’s a lesson to be learned there.

00:25:40 Prof Haaken Strand

As a researcher.

00:25:41 Prof Haaken Strand

Changing from one culture or one continent to another continent.

00:25:45 Prof Haaken Strand

The only thing I can think about straight up is you come from one culture or one country with certain values and to another come from swim to Australia. Lot of similarities but something’s really hit me the.

00:25:59 Prof Haaken Strand

Much stronger segregation in Australia, for example.

00:26:03 Prof Haaken Strand

And that can affect and how you see this? well-being among people from different groups and also the inequity between male and female, while in Sweden was pretty much much, much more equity equitable than here, Australia still a little bit.

00:26:18 Prof Haaken Strand

A little bit, quite a bit difference between male and female, so that’s affecting us. Where you gonna do like quality of life research and well-being and interview patients or people you may not always have the same background values with you and you have to be aware of that when you start to do analysis that can impact how you interpret the information you have.

00:26:38 Prof Haaken Strand

Lived in an interview, for example.

00:26:41 Dr Dianne Wepa

Just to sign off, I really like the five ways to well-being, which the research I’ve done on that is from the UK, which I’m quite pleased about because I when I was in New Zealand I would hear, hear those five ways to well-being. And then when I moved to the UK, I heard them again.

00:26:57 Dr Dianne Wepa

And then one of.

00:26:58 Dr Dianne Wepa

My colleagues, Professor Mary Steen, she said, you know, they originated from the UK.

00:27:04 Dr Dianne Wepa

Well, just you know, I need to acknowledge that you know where that’s come from. And if you don’t recall what they are, you know it’s to connect, keep learning, be active, give and take notice. And I think that resonates no matter what culture you come from or place you. You know you originate from.

00:27:23 Dr Dianne Wepa

It’s always a good sort of framework, I think, to just have us take a pause.

00:27:28 Dr Dianne Wepa

Because I think working from Kristen Neff, she’s a great advocate of taking a pause in one’s life, but that’s for another podcast for another day. So I think, yeah, if we take a pause and just look at the five ways to well-being connect, keep learning the active give and take notice. I mean, that is evidence based as well those.

00:27:48 Dr Dianne Wepa

Five ways. And so I think it works. So why wouldn’t we do that?

00:27:53 Will Mountford

If there’s anyone who’s heard this interview and says, oh, I want to know more about resilience or more about.

00:28:01 Will Mountford

Differences or more about any part? What would be a good DUI to send them to? Or a good journal title? This is just the chance we’re going to put all of the links in the episode description for, you know, read more, even if it’s just head to my staff page and click any of the papers there.

00:28:17 Dr Dianne Wepa

I did publish a paper in 2019 called struggling to be involved and that was a theory that I created out of my PhD to look at for Indigenous people. Anyway, in New Zealand, how they were able to draw on their collective sense of well-being in order to navigate through the healthcare.

00:28:35 Dr Dianne Wepa

System in New Zealand and you know, there were elements of racism, historical trauma, things like that. But there were a lot of positives that came out of that and being resilient was one of them. So if if listeners are interested in looking at a cultural response to resilience, they can definitely look at that journal article.

00:28:54 Will Mountford

And Hawking anything on your side that you’d like to?

00:28:57 Will Mountford

Plug or promote at this point.

00:28:59 Prof Haaken Strand

Not directed. Last papers I’ve had has been much more but clinical research, so that’s not really effective well-being or impact on the well-being.

00:29:08 Prof Haaken Strand

Unfortunately, as soon as possible.

00:29:11 Prof Haaken Strand

Not in that area.

00:29:12 Dr Dianne Wepa

But if people want to look at historical literature because that’s why I was bringing up Michael Rutter, 1991, like it’s interesting, isn’t it? When you look back at research that’s 20-30 years old and you think it still resonates today, so I’d.

00:29:27 Dr Dianne Wepa

Be interested on what the listeners think looking at the older foundational type literature on resilience, and see whether there has been a change.

00:29:35 Prof Haaken Strand

And even go back to the 70s and banduras still fatigue.

00:29:39 Prof Haaken Strand

As a theory.

00:29:40 Prof Haaken Strand

Because if you can look after yourself, then it should cover the form 5 areas of well-being and give you well-being as well.

00:29:48 Dr Dianne Wepa

So we can provide those references as well if people like.

00:29:52 Will Mountford

How would you try and condense?

00:29:55 Will Mountford

Attitudes and research and your own activity down.

00:29:58 Will Mountford

To a couple of sentences.

00:30:00 Dr Dianne Wepa

I think we can take a leaf out of the pandemic and the human response to infections and chronic disease, as Hawkins says. And I think, yeah, the take away would be that instead of looking at a single event and thinking how we respond to avoid an event or.

00:30:20 Dr Dianne Wepa

An occasion to become resilience, I think, looking at controlled exposure overtime and like childhood experiences and how overtime that has brought us to a point of becoming resilient because I think it’s something that the process takes time for us as humans.

00:30:37 Dr Dianne Wepa

To arrive at that point, it can’t just be one thing and you know how it’s easy for us to judge, say, oh, you’re not resilient because so I think that’s not useful. So in terms of research, I think looking back in terms of someone’s childhood experience like.

00:30:51 Dr Dianne Wepa

We said before.

00:30:52 Dr Dianne Wepa

If there’s one adult that role models a good response to a traumatic events, for example, then that role modeling.

00:31:00 Dr Dianne Wepa

Will come through to our early childhood experiences, so I think it’s over time. It’s a lifetime of exposure to situations that I think helped build our resilience rather than avoiding a situation to become resilient.

00:31:15 Prof Haaken Strand

Spin further on that, I will say that you mentioned having this role model person. They may represent some kind of emotional safety feeling for you and therefore you can build from that and develop kind of resilience that then undermine, underpin your well-being because you kind of learn.

00:31:35 Prof Haaken Strand

You don’t feel threatened all the.

00:31:37 Prof Haaken Strand

Time you know that.

00:31:38 Prof Haaken Strand

There’s some way to save point. Then you can find strength from and as I said before.

00:31:44 Prof Haaken Strand

Now and then take time out, sit down and really think. Where am I? What do I really want to do? What is the best way for me?

00:31:52 Prof Haaken Strand

I think that’s it’s important, but I’m going to see how can we help people to build that? How can we empower and to have that take take off time where they can look into themselves and see their way forward.

00:32:04 Dr Dianne Wepa

Building protective factors, isn’t it? Yeah. And and grounding ourselves, too. There’s literature on that now, like taking a pause, grounding ourselves, and then it builds resilience over time.

00:32:16 Will Mountford

Doctor Wepa. Professor strand. Thank you both so much.

00:32:18 Will Mountford

For your time today.

00:32:19 Dr Dianne Wepa

Thank you, will.

00:32:20 Prof Haaken Strand

Thank you.

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