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The Global Flourishing Study (Johnson, et al., 2024) was hailed as one of the most ambitious undertakings in modern social science. Over 207,000 participants, 22 countries, six core domains of wellbeing — all aimed at answering one timeless question: What contributes to a life well-lived?
The study’s reach is extraordinary. It measures happiness, health, purpose, virtue, relationships, and financial stability across 23 diverse countries. It’s a milestone in the growing global movement to understand human flourishing.
And yet, amid all the precision and scale, one absence is striking. Not once does the study mention disability, neurodiversity, or accessibility.
For a study designed to map the full topography of the human experience, that silence speaks volumes. Because disability — physical, intellectual, cognitive, or sensory — is not an outlier in the human story. It is part of the human condition.
Flourishing’s Blind Spot
The Global Flourishing Study defines flourishing as “the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good.” It’s an elegant definition, but one that raises a critical question: Whose life are we talking about?
If our frameworks for wellbeing are built without considering how disability shapes experience, access, and opportunity, then our understanding of flourishing risks being incomplete — or worse, exclusionary.
Disability inclusion is not a marginal concern of healthcare or education policy. It is a profound test of how societies define and distribute wellbeing. And, as growing evidence suggests, how a culture supports disability doesn’t just determine the quality of life for disabled individuals — it ripples across families, schools, workplaces, and entire communities.
How Disability Inclusion Shapes Collective Wellbeing
Around the world, how disability is understood and supported varies widely. In some societies, difference is seen as a communal responsibility — something to be collectively scaffolded through care networks, accessible infrastructure, and inclusive education. In others, it remains individualized — the burden of the person or family navigating systems not built to include them.
These cultural orientations matter.
Research from family systems, education, and occupational health consistently shows that when disabled individuals are supported to thrive, their communities thrive too. Parents experience less burnout and greater life satisfaction. Siblings show higher levels of empathy, adaptability, and prosocial behavior. Teachers report more creative and inclusive classrooms. Workplaces with neurodiverse teams demonstrate greater innovation and problem-solving capacity.
Inclusion, in short, is a wellbeing multiplier.
Conversely, when disability is stigmatized or unsupported, stress reverberates outward. Families become isolated. Educators and service providers experience compassion fatigue. Employers miss out on talent and perspective. Communities lose opportunities for connection and growth.
How a society treats disability is not a side note in its flourishing profile — it is the measure.
The Missing Dimension: Autistic Flourishing
Within the broader category of disability, autism offers a particularly revealing lens into this conversation. Autistic individuals experience the world through unique sensory, cognitive, and emotional patterns. Their pathways to happiness, engagement, and meaning may differ from what traditional wellbeing measures capture, but they are no less valid (Pellicano & Heyworth, 2023).
Autistic flourishing might look like:
- The satisfaction of predictability and structure.
- The joy of deep focus on a special interest.
- The comfort of authenticity in social interactions.
- The wellbeing found in purpose-driven solitude or creative expression.
Yet, current flourishing indices rarely measure these experiences (Little et al., 2024). The result is a paradox: the very individuals who could expand our scientific understanding of thriving are rendered invisible by the tools meant to study it (Little et al., 2024).
Neurodiversity Essential Reads
Defining and studying autistic flourishing is not about fitting autistic people into existing wellbeing models. It’s to evolve those models (Hedlund et al., 2025), to reflect the full spectrum of human ways of being well (Pellicano & Heyworth, 2023).
From Individual to Ecological Flourishing
Positive psychology has always emphasized that wellbeing can be learned and cultivated. But that learning doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s shaped by context — by systems, communities, and cultures.
Flourishing, in its truest sense, is ecological. It depends on how we design environments that allow everyone to participate meaningfully.
If classrooms are overstimulating, workplaces inflexible, or social norms intolerant of difference, the barrier is not within the person: it’s within the system. When we shift that system toward accessibility, empathy, and shared purpose, we don’t just help disabled individuals flourish; we create conditions that make flourishing possible for everyone (Hedlund et al., 2025).
A society that centers inclusion doesn’t lower the bar for wellbeing — it raises it.
Toward a More Inclusive Science of Happiness
The next frontier of wellbeing research must be intersectional and inclusive. That means embedding disability and neurodiversity variables in global datasets, partnering with disabled and autistic researchers, and designing tools that measure not just happiness, but belonging.
It also means redefining success: not as normalization, but as authenticity — the freedom to flourish on one’s own terms.
The Global Flourishing Study has given us a monumental foundation. Now it’s time to build upward — and outward — to include the millions of lives it has yet to measure.
Because flourishing is not the privilege of the majority. It’s the shared right of humanity.
—Katie Curran, MAPP
