From Function to Felicitude: Physical Disability and the Search for Happiness in Health Services Research

Abstract

Historically, research and practice in physical disability have emphasized the destructive and disabling consequences of illness and injury. More recently, we have begun to measure outcomes related to health, satisfaction, and quality-of-life. There has been little systematic attention to the study of happiness, felicitude, but data show that even for many of the people with most notable impairment, levels of happiness are high. The quest for felicitude requires methodological changes and, more significantly, greater professional humility to appreciate that people with both physical and intellectual impairments are able to experience and articulate their own satisfaction, pleasure, and joy. Fortified with this unpretentiousness, we can find happiness and begin to incorporate it as an outcome of clinical and public health programs.