Well-Being Sphere of America

The Project

With supporting funding from the Well Being Trust* foundation, Spherit—a boutique R&D company in Colorado—created a conversation map of the mental health and wellbeing challenges in America.

It was called the Well-Being Sphere of America and it presented a big picture and detail perspective on a single page to integrate meaning making for high level engagement in the mental health sector.

Before this project, every sphere application Spherit had created was for individuals, teams, and organizations to voice their own views of a specific situation—to see ‘self’ within it. The Well-Being Sphere of America was the first time existing research data was used as a nationwide “voice” on behalf of citizen issues in America.

The Well-Being Sphere of America program on a laptop

*Well Being Trust is a national foundation dedicated to advancing mental, social and spiritual well-being. The organization is investing in approaches that have the potential to model the way forward and advance clinical, community and cultural change … to transform the health of the nation and improve well-being for everyone.

Why this, why then?

In 2022, 90% of US adults believed the United States was experiencing a mental health crisis.
Mental health experts were severely understaffed to meet the need.

Who was it for?

Professionals who were invested in the mental health and wellbeing of our population.
Leaders in business, legislation and non-profits in America who had an interest in addressing this crisis.

A father working at a laptop with his sleeping baby in his arm

How did it work?

The Well-Being Sphere of America was the first of its kind online conversation map that used contextual reasoning to clarify the content. It had no ties to political entities or corporate sponsors. Experiencing it called for both kinds of human attention: the kind that moves line by line, and the kind that takes in the whole at once. This created the potential for collaborative conversations.

What did it reveal?

To create this convo map, Spherit identified 10 sectors and 92 facets affecting the mental wellbeing of Americans and displayed these on an animated sphere-chart with crucial notes and sources. None of this meant good things weren’t happening across America. It meant these were the concerns Americans heard most—in headlines, driving fear—and concerns that loud deserve to be seen in context. We like to say the results we achieved were a ‘crude look at the whole’ (to borrow a phrase from physicist Murray Gell-Mann).

Why a sphere?

Because hard facts encountered in isolation do what the culture does with them—trigger fear, pick sides, or numb us into scrolling past. Encountered in context—one facet among 92, seen alongside housing, purpose, schools, and assets, for instance—the same hard fact becomes navigable. The question shifts from “how terrifying is this?” to “where does this connect, and where can I show up?”

The reveal is in The Overview, below.

What was the motivation?

Mental health touches every household in America, yet the system that serves it works in pieces—and the factors that drive wellbeing, like employment, sleep, and even access to nature, often sit outside the walls of care entirely. The Sphere was built to address that fragmented system and to unify our understanding of it.

Where did the data come from?

This visual model came into shape after extensively reviewing and synthesizing “existing,” publicly available nationwide research. It drew on information average Americans could find themselves if they happened to have hundreds of hours to search for it and verify it. The project spanned 11 months and more than 1,200 hours of investigation, documentation, verification, and sphere-chart preparation—thousands of online searches, and 277 source references on the final animated sphere. Trends within the data were then identified.

Bare feet walking through cracked, muddy earth

A child splashing joyfully through water

What was it for?

It was designed as a way to get unstuck—to rise up from our entrenched and invested positions in mental health and observe the whole of these issues to better utilize our resources and energize more possibilities for widespread wellbeing. The Well-Being Sphere of America presented an opportunity to see, think and act in refreshing new ways.

A note on timing: every search, every synthesis, and every citation was done by hand in 2022—before generative AI tools were available to do this kind of work.*

What happened next?

Deep into the project, the foundation—facing significant post-Covid losses—shifted its focus to its internal network, and the planned public launch was never funded. The commitment held: the map was delivered in full and signed off as complete.

The results were too valuable to shelve, so we built this site with our own resources to preserve them—in case they prove useful to anyone who discovers them.

*What carries forward?

That lengthy labor in 2022—the searching, gathering, verifying—is work AI can now do in days. What AI cannot supply on its own is the method for seeing a whole situation at once. That part we built over two decades, by hand, and it transfers—to give AI a better way to comprehend human complexity, and to give people a new way to see their own complexity. No one can train the world to see in context. Yet anyone can experience it with The Sphere, and what we like to call the geometry of thinking.

A Special Thanks

Dr. Benjamin F. Miller, PsyD

The creators of the Well-Being Sphere of America would like to express their deepest gratitude to Dr. Benjamin Miller for championing this pilot. This endeavor would not have been possible without his advocacy for whole-system approaches to health and wellbeing and for his belief in the prospect of what this experience might add to the national conversation towards new ways of showing up to this significant challenge of mental health in America.

Dr. Miller later wrote about the Sphere in his essay “Visualizing the Whole of Health.”

The Sphere in Motion

The project originally offered four explanatory videos, a video blog, and a full interactive program. For this record, we’ve condensed it all down to three short videos—the overview, a rapid wrap-up, and one vlog post.

The Overview [4:15]

Watch this short but comprehensive video to grasp the scope of the material.

The Rapid Wrap-Up [43 sec]

This excerpt is a fast pass across a sampling of the sphere’s findings.

Why Spherical Is Critical [2:12]

During COVID, an artist’s 3-D model of the virus—she called it The Sphere—helped scientists see it whole. Watch two minutes on why the same idea matters for mental health in America and for streamlining hard conversations of any kind.

Music used in videos licensed through a music membership.