Bringing Resilience to Practice: Chances, Difficulties and Concepts

Abstract

The concept of resilience is of widespread interest not only in science, but also in public health care and organizations for two reasons: First, mental illness is not only associated with a serious individual burden and reduced quality-adjusted life years, but has also proved to be increasingly relevant in terms of societal and economic costs. Second, there is growing awareness that the absence of mental illness does not necessarily imply the presence of mental health and effective psychosocial functioning. Existing treatments that are effective in alleviating mental illness are not necessarily effective in promoting mental health. The important challenge is to strengthen the interdisciplinary transfer of empirical research on resilience to the development of empirically and theoretically profound prevention strategies. The chances and difficulties involved in this transfer process are illuminated by the presentation of a newly developed prevention program called “Live in Balance†(Bohus, Berger, Wenner, Lyssenko, 2013). Questions of evaluation in terms of effectiveness and acceptance are discussed.