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Well-being is a concept which can connect together a number of important ideas that have a strong resonance for professional education and practice across the human services. This can critically include considerations of illness, crisis, and loss. Such acute moments in individuals’ lives can be examined through their precipitating events, coping mechanisms, and responses. This article explores some of the dimensions of well-being and how they facilitate a greater understanding of illness, crisis, and loss. These deliberations are then exemplified through a focus on alcohol and other drug use.

The topic of well-being is one that is receiving increasing attention in a number of academic fields and professional disciplines. It is a concept that can be used as a unifying theme to link together a number of important concepts that have significant implications for professional education and practice across the human services. This article explores different aspects of well-being, differentiates well-being from the now-stigmatized term of welfare, and argues that professional education has much to be gained from adopting a well-being approach. It presents well-being as an important basis for addressing issues relating to illness, crisis, and loss.

It is well known that bereavement presents major challenges of adjustment to the individuals so affected, but what is much less well recognized is the major challenges bereavement can present to organizations in general and their managers and human resources professionals in particular. This article explores the significance of death for the workplace and argues that organization that fail to give adequate attention to such matters will be poorly placed when it comes to promoting workplace well-being.

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on employee welfare or, as it is being referred to with increasing frequency, “workplace well-being.” Traditional approaches to such issues have tended to be either medicalized (via occupational health interventions) or individualized (for example, through employee assistance programs—EAPs). This article proposes a broader approach based on the problem-solving perspective of occupational social work. It is argued that such a broader approach offers a sounder foundation for tackling workplace problems and promoting well-being in general and for addressing the challenges of loss, grief, and trauma in the workplace in particular.

Existentialism as a school of philosophy raises important questions about meaning and purpose and other such factors traditionally associated with spirituality. It also raises important questions about death and dying and the finite nature of human existence. As such, it provides a useful platform for developing our understanding of how spirituality relates to experiences of crisis, loss, and grief. This article explores some key existentialist issues, such as the paradox of meaning, the nature of human existence, personal and social identity and authenticity, and relates each of these to the interface between spirituality on the one hand, and crisis and loss on the other.

Older people are no less prone to experiences of crisis and loss than any other age cohort. Indeed, it could be argued that this group is even more prone to such experiences, although both the therapeutic literature on crisis intervention and the thanatological literature on loss and grief pay relatively little heed to the needs and circumstances of older people. This article therefore seeks to go some way toward redressing the balance by exploring the significance of crisis and loss as part of the lived experience (le vecu) of older people. The arguments presented are set in the context of the need to recognize and challenge the significant role of ageism.