Using Knowledge in Real Settings

CARBC is committed to helping community leaders, educators, health and social service workers and citizens take effective action in addressing the impact of alcohol, tobacco and other drug use on their communities, schools and workplaces. The supports provided here are grounded in a social-ecological model of health promotion.

In our society, we tend to think of health within a “pathogenic” paradigm, as not suffering from some disease, and of mental health as the absence of a psychological illness or disorder. But as historian of medicine H.E. Sigerist recognized in the last century, health is more, something positive. The World Health Organization has defined it with a more “salutogenic” thrust, as a state of comprehensive physical, mental and social wellbeing that accordingly applies at both a personal and collective level.