via www.centreforconfidence.co.uk
The Centre for Confidence and Well-being is one of the fruits of the policy ferment in the early years of Scottish devolution. Funded initially by the Scottish Executive, the Centre picked up on the burgeoning literature in the early 00's on positive psychology and happiness studies, and tried to apply that to Scotland's well-below-par health indicators, both physical and mental (and of course their interrelation). Its founder and director Carol Craig has become one of the most penetrating critics of the collective psychological condition of Scottish life: her two books, The Scots Crisis of Confidence and this year's The Tears That Built the Clyde (both available here), are the kinds of multidisciplinary, reformist writing we need more of from the Scottish intelligentsia.