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In partnership with the University of Western Australia (UWA), the strengths-based National Empowerment Project (NEP) brought together researchers from across Australia and began to address issues surrounding Aboriginal wellbeing and, in particular, the high rates of Aboriginal deaths by suicide. The NEP utilised participatory action research (PAR) and was concerned with promoting positive cultural, social, and emotional wellbeing (CSEWB) and building capacity and resilience within Aboriginal communities. Throughout the NEP, consultations with 11 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities led to the development of a CSEWB program. The program seeks to increase self-determination and empowerment, developing participants’ awareness of a variety of issues relevant to wellbeing. This enables participants to gain a greater understanding of the holistic nature of CSEWB and the complex influences on Aboriginal wellbeing at individual, family, and community levels. This chapter is concerned with the development and delivery of the CSEWB program within three community sites in Perth, Western Australia. Shared philosophical approaches of the CSEWB program, between UWA and Aboriginal communities were human rights and social justice, community ownership, community capacity building, a strong focus on resilience, empowerment and partnerships, respect for local knowledge, and the delivery of community consultations. Investigation into the impacts of the program are based in an anti-colonial space, employing Indigenous Standpoint Theory and PAR approaches. This chapter demonstrates the success of the CSEWB program, links this success to the vital importance of Indigenous research ethics, and positions the research within an empowering and capacity-building context.

Social and emotional wellbeing (SEWB) is a term used to refer to the state of an individual's overall wellbeing. This review aims to consider the importance of understanding and assessing SEWB in prisoner populations, and identify potentially important differences between groups of prisoners, including those who identify as from minority cultural backgrounds (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander in Australia), protective custody prisoners, remand prisoners, prisoners identified with an intellectual disability, and prisoners with an acquired brain injury.

The paper is a general review of the published literature, with a specific focus on work conducted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia.

Eight domains of SEWB are identified across which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, along with those in protection units, remandees, and prisoners with intellectual disabilities or acquired brain injuries are likely to experience particularly low levels of functioning. Few programs have been developed to address these needs, although attending to low levels of SEWB has the potential to make a positive contribution to prisoner health, prison management, and offender rehabilitation.

Relatively little literature has considered this topic previously and, as a result, the paper is necessarily descriptive. Nonetheless, issues of SEWB appear to warrant further consideration, particularly in relation to those prisoners who identify with minority cultural groups.

Previous research emphasises the need for preventative interventions to reduce mental health problems among disadvantaged children and adolescents. There is however little consensus concerning the delivery and impacts of such interventions particularly non-clinical, arts-based models delivered within community settings. The purpose of this paper is to begin to address this deficit through a qualitative assessment of the short- to medium-term impacts to participants’ mental and emotional wellbeing within Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise orchestral programme.

Semi-structured interviews, observation, participant drawing exercise, participatory filmmaking, focus group and analysis of programme engagement were undertaken to examine the mental and emotional wellbeing impacts of the programme which are observable at this early stage of programme delivery and participants’ lives.

The qualitative findings indicate that participation in the Big Noise programme enhances participant mental and emotional wellbeing in three ways; first, the happiness and enjoyment of taking part in the programme and orchestra, particularly from music making; second, the security, belonging and relationships fostered through participation; the quality of musician/participant relationship is important here as is programme design which enables support, routine and structure; and third, increased pride, confidence and self-esteem, as a result of acquiring difficult musical skills, receiving regular praise and having frequent opportunities to demonstrate these acquired skills through regular orchestral performances.

There is little evidence or understanding of community-based, preventative, arts interventions like Big Noise: their delivery, their life-course impacts and their potential contribution to mental health and to addressing social and health inequalities. The causal pathways in the field are under-theorised. These early findings are important as they serve as an important basis from which to consider the programme’s wider and longer term impacts, which will be assessed through an on-going longitudinal, mixed method summative evaluation.

This paper aims to determine educators' perceptions about the benefits of contact with nature for children's mental, emotional and social health.

The approach was exploratory using qualitative methods. Face‐to‐face interviews were conducted with school principals and teachers as well as professionals from the environmental education industry. Interviews focused on the perceived benefits for children's health from school activities involving hands‐on contact with nature.

Hands‐on contact with nature is perceived by educators to improve self‐esteem, engagement with school and a sense of empowerment, among other benefits. Different types of activities are perceived to have different outcomes. A model is proposed to illustrate the findings.

Activities involving hands‐on contact with nature may have significant health outcomes for children. Further empirical work is needed to determine the extent of the benefits and provide further evidence.

Findings support the value of activities involving nature and provide further incentive to include such activities in teaching curricula. Activities involving hands‐on contact with nature at school may be a means of promoting children's mental, emotional and social health at a crucial time in their development.

This paper addresses two gaps in current knowledge: much research on contact with nature and health and wellbeing has focused on adults not children; despite the popularity of nature‐based activities in schools there has been no investigation into the potential of these activities to promote children's mental, emotional and social health.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate an innovative collaboration between health, housing and social care by exploring the “short stay project” apartments from service users’ perspectives and considering the effectiveness of this service model as part of enabling provision locally.

The qualitative methodology for this evaluation was interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith, 2011), critically exploring service users’ personal lived experience of the “short stay project”. Three service users (n=3) participated in semi-structured interviews.

This study has identified the “short stay project” can prevent admission into and facilitate discharge from care and health services by offering a temporary stay in self-contained, adapted accommodation. Service users found value in staying at the apartments for differing reasons. However, practitioners must address service users’ emotional and social needs as well as physical needs to reduce the risk of occupational deprivation.

Sample size is not fully representative of the total population making transferability limited.

This research found there is demand for temporary housing provision for service users with health, housing and/or social care needs.

Key drivers of demand for the service are social inequalities relating to homelessness, poverty and gender-based violence rather than the health-related issues that could have been expected. Further research into the development of effective integrated services which maximise service users’ wellbeing and occupational performance is recommended.

Service models which integrate health, housing and social care can be innovative and maintain service users’ independence and wellbeing in the community. Commissioners across health, housing and social care could utilise the Better Care Fund to deliver integrated services to meet rising demands.

The transition from primary school to secondary school is viewed globally as a crucial period in students' lives and a challenging transition can have both short-term and long-term consequences for the wellbeing of students. Despite primary-secondary transition being so important, it is a neglected area of research in general in most countries including South Africa. By smoothing the transition from primary to secondary school challenges that are related to students' disengagement with education, school failure (school dropout), and continued social inequality can be addressed. In this chapter, the value of a transition intervention based on peer mentoring to ease the transition of students in five primary schools in an area of the country where the context is characterized by socioeconomic challenges is discussed. A lack of resources and funding make it difficult to provide individual support to all these students. In response to this challenge, a peer-mentoring approach has been applied to develop an intervention aimed at preparing the students with insight into the challenges that awaits them. The intervention encompasses a workshop attended by a representative group of 20 Grade 7 students, selected based on the leadership skills as demonstrated in their interactions with adults and peers. Following the workshop, they are given the opportunity to give feedback to their Grade 7 peers and also avail themselves for individual discussions with their peers. In this chapter, we critically reflect on the value of this peer-mentored approach for socioeconomically challenged school contexts.

In England health promotion has an important role to play in delivering the aims of the new health and social care modernisation programme. Two health promotion strategies evident in recent policy documents concern the provision of good quality information and encouraging greater social participation. Providing information about health issues is intended to empower people, promote independence and help them to become, and stay, healthy. Encouraging social participation is intended to reduce social isolation and stress, build social capital, and promote mental health and wellbeing. This paper presents findings from a qualitative sociological study of an Ageing Well project for housebound older people relevant to these policy goals. The findings reveal what older people valued about participating in the project, and how it enhanced their sense of wellbeing. It is argued that, for this group of people, ‘feeling happy’ and maintaining a positive sense of wellbeing were transitory experiences involving a range of strategies to ‘manage’ information. The lessons for health promotion from this study suggest that providing health‐related information may conflict with, rather than complement, efforts to promote mental health by compromising the ways in which people in difficult circumstances construct their sense of wellbeing and strive to feel happy.

This paper aims to explore the role of drama and theatre in promoting the emotional and social wellbeing of a group of young Black men living in south London.

A qualitative methodology was used in a process and outcome evaluation of a drama‐based initiative that aimed to promote young Black men's sexual and emotional health.

The research found that this community‐based initiative was able to promote young people's self‐esteem and a positive sense of agency. This was achieved by creating opportunities for self‐expression, reflection and self‐understanding, and through the development of relationships between participants characterised by trust and reciprocity.

The evaluation points to the strengths of youth and community work and arts‐based approaches in engaging young people around health issues and in promoting emotional wellbeing and a positive sense of identity among young people. The evaluation also highlights the usefulness of process‐oriented qualitative evaluation as an appropriate way of evaluating and contributing to the ongoing development of initiatives that aim to use the arts in healthcare settings.

The paper seeks to clarify the links between education and mental health in European policy and practice.

The paper provides an overview of the literature and clarification of what it shows.

Education has a major role in promoting mental health by enhancing positive wellbeing and tackling mental health problems. Education is in itself protective of mental health – so we need to increase access support inclusively and target at‐risk groups. Mental health and education need to improve their mutual communication between them. More needs to be done to develop evidence‐based, explicit, planned and evaluated whole‐school programmes to promote mental health, which develop the kind of climates and practices that are conducive to emotional wellbeing and help staff and pupils learn key skills. The European evidence base is poor and we need to put more resources into developing it, and networks between programmes, research and policy makers.

Bringing together the key elements in the arguments and evidence on how mental health and education could and do link together.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest how well-being messages are recontextualized into school-based contexts from an analysis of national policy and state curricular approaches to health education as reported in the findings of two selected case studies as well as community concerns about young people’s well-being.

A cross-sectional review of Australian federal and state-level student well-being policy documents was undertaken. Using two case examples of school-based in-curricular well-being programs, the paper explores how discourses from these well-being policy documents are recontextualized through progressive fields of translation and pedagogic decision making into local forms of curriculum.

Pedagogic messages about well-being in Australia are often extra-curricular, in that they are rarely integrated into one or across existing subject areas. Such messages are increasingly focused on mental health, around phenomena such as bullying. Both case examples clearly demonstrate how understandings of well-being respond to various power relations and pressures emanating from stakeholders within and across official pedagogic fields and other contexts such as local communities.

The paper focusses on presenting an adaptation of Bernstein’s (1990) model of social reproduction of pedagogic discourse. The adapted model demonstrates how “top-down” knowledge production from the international disciplines shaping curriculum development and pedagogic approaches can be replaced by community context-driven political pressure and perceived community crises. It offers contemporary insight into youth-at-risk discourses, well-being approaches and student mental health.