Redefining Resilience as a Public Health Response to Stress

Abstract

Stress, a transdiagnostic risk factor linked to both physical and psychological illness, is important to population health and health equity. Promoting population resilience, or the capability for populations to “bounce back” in the face of stressors, may act as a public health antidote to stress-related illness by bolstering a population’s capability to cope and adapt following varied stresses.Despite extensive research into resilience at the individual level, little is known about its potential at the population level. This dissertation leverages the COVID-19 pandemic to advance the understanding of population resilience. Specific aims are: 1) Develop a structural model of population health as an alternative to the biomedical model and propose “structural resilience” as a population health outcome; 2) Compare the biomedical and structural models in the context of population-level distress during the COVID-19 pandemic; 3) Explore population psychological distress as a potential measure for the construct of “structural resilience.”