The Issue 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.

Optimal mental health means being successfully able to cope with life setbacks; having productive and healthy interactions with family members and friends; having, at the very least, functional relationships with co-workers and other informal acquaintances; and being able to successfully acclimate to society. These are elements that can certainly be lacking in someone without any sort of identifiable mental or emotional illness.

So if one lacks the ability to productively cope with the setbacks and the interactions that are inherent to existence, are they considered mentally ill? Generally not, though one might make an argument that this sort of dysfunction is, in fact, mental illness. This may be especially true in cases where individuals act out in response to an inability to cope, or use alcohol or narcotics as coping methods. Addicts or people who are hostile or withdrawn in social interactions aren't generally labeled mentally ill. Changing this would encourage scores of people to seek psychological treatment.

The argument against broadening the definition of mental illness, and encouraging more people to seek psychological treatment, is that seeking psychological treatment for common dysfunction is overkill, is intrusive, and is akin to sedating large sections of the population. But mental health treatment needn't be oppressive, or sedating, at all. This is not a suggestion to pass out pharmaceuticals in bunches -- even more than they're being passed out already.

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.

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