A Consideration Of Mental Health

The term mental health is thrown around a lot -- this has especially been true during the few decades previous -- but mental health's complete meaning is often misunderstood. Casual discussion of mental health typically focuses on substantial mental disorders: schizophrenia illness, bipolar disease, sociopathic behavior, Alzheimer's, and other conditions. But what's excluded in conversations like this is the reality that mental health factors into everyone's life: all of us.

Mental health emphasis is typically on disorder. A person with some sort of a condition is mentally unhealthy, while a person free of condition possesses mental health. This sort of thinking is problematic in a couple of ways. Firstly, many people with legitimate mental health conditions go undiagnosed. The world is filled with the mentally and emotionally undiagnosed.

Secondly, optimal mental health isn't only the absence of a mental condition, or the presentation of symptoms. Mental health isn't solely about not having: it's just as equally about having.

To have optimal mental wellness means successfully coping with life difficulties; having healthy and productive social interactions with friends and family; having stable and functional relationships with informal acquaintances, such as co-workers; and generally being able to acclimate to society at large. These characteristics can absolutely be lacking in persons without apparent psychological or emotional illness.

Does lacking the ability to cope with life's challenges and social interaction imply mental illness? Not in most cases, no. However, one might be able to make the argument that dysfunction does rise to the level of mental illness, particularly where people act out, or turn to alcohol or drugs as a means of coping. Addicts or social misfits aren't typically labeled as mentally ill. Altering this reality would encourage scores to seek out mental health treatment.

Taking this approach -- defining typical dysfunction as indications of mental or psychological illness, and subsequently encouraging treatment for such -- would surely come up against opposition. Arguments in opposition might include the thinking that labeling and treating basic dysfunctions would be a case of overkill, would intrude on people's lives, and would be tantamount to medicating scores of people. But does this really constitute a legitimate counter argument? There's no absolute law that requires mental health to be an intrusive experience, or some type of pharmaceutical experience. No one is suggesting that pharmaceuticals be passed about in even greater quantity than they are now.

At its core, mental health treatment, should teach coping techniques, which is not the same as changing someone's reality. Keep the reality -- change the inappropriate coping strategies. This sort of an approach doesn't have to involve any kind of pharmaceutical treatment. The treatment of mental health has an extensive history, much of it having nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceuticals aren't necessary to treat basic psychological or emotional function. Let's get this truth into open space, where it belongs.