Dr. Laurie Santos is a professor of psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University. As the head of one of the University’s colleges, she lives on campus. This experience opened her eyes to a startling reality: her students were facing a mental health crisis.
In a presentation at the John Templeton Foundation in June 2024, she shared insights from her experience, and how it led her to create a curriculum focused on wellbeing.
“This was a shocker to me, but something that I saw living in the trenches,” Santos said. “I was constantly thinking about what we could do to solve this crisis and help young people flourish.”
To help her students, she developed a course focused on happiness and strategies to improve mental well-being.
Initially, Santos wasn’t sure how many students would show up for the class, called “The Science of Well-Being.”
She expected a small cohort of around 30 students. To her amazement, a quarter of the entire Yale student body enrolled for the course. Given its popularity, Santos realized that young people all over the world might be interested. After all, the mental health crisis was not only a phenomenon at Yale.
Partnering with Coursera, she recorded lectures for an online class. This course has over four million subscribers.
Watch the full presentation on what Santos and her team have learned in their efforts to promote the science of well-being here:
“[Kids] don’t want to be burnt-out; they want to be flourishing. I also think they want evidence-based solutions; they want to know what the science is saying,” Santos said.
“I hope that this has shown that we can help improve the well-being of all sorts of people from different backgrounds, because that’s what we’re all about.”
You can read more about Dr. Santos’s research on her website at https://www.drlauriesantos.com/.
