Redefining Mental Health
It’s time that we rethink the way we talk about mental health. But first, what’s wrong with how we talk about mental health? It’s how we think about mental health that confuses the way we talk about mental health. Mental health includes how we think, feel, and act-psychologically and socially. That is-how we experience and engage our internal and external worlds.
Humans are social beings, interdependent on one another for survival, fun, and connecting to a host of other needs and wants. Still-living, thinking, and feeling are very much individualized experiences. Imagine that you’re headed out on a date. Maybe the date starts with couples massages. Your coworker told you about a restaurant uptown, and maybe you go there for dinner. The night is still young and outside feels safe and fun, so you both agree to a movie.
Because we are natured and nurtured differently, you and your date are likely to experience the evening differently. My wife and I always compete with our meal choices. More times than not she picks better meals at restaurants. I pick better movies, but she doesn’t always enjoy them. Then we spend the 45 minute ride away from the city ruminating on the night. After an evening of shared experiences, we often recount our activities reasonably different.
That is, a steak is not just a steak. And neither is mental health. The smiley face Likert scale is common on healthcare intake forms. The 3-faced scale goes-sad, meh, happy. The 5-faced scale goes-really sad, sad, meh, happy, really happy. The problem with these scales are the same problem with how we generally think and talk about mental health.
Mental health is a continuum of emotions, thinking, and behaving. Happy doesn’t look the same on everybody. In fact, happy might look like meh for some people. And happiness is an internal experience, not an emoji, expression, or action. Smiles and frowns are socially conditioned behaviors for how we generally communicate our internal experience. Because a sad person may smile and a happy person might wear a meh expression, these nonverbal clues are reasonably unreliable.
We generally think and talk about mental health normatively. This is unreliable. As opposed to measuring human psychology against the whole, some, or scales, we should be measuring human wellness by the distance one deviates from their best and/or worst Self. That is-how a person feels/thinks/acts today as opposed to how they performed a week ago is a more reasonable measurement, than comparing to a standard of wellness.
By looking upward/downward/sideways in society to gauge our wellbeing, we risk developing false senses of identity and wellbeing. Standards of normal and abnormal are dangerously unreliable concepts. Mental health is an individual experience. We should be talking, thinking, and promoting how to maintain a psychological and social Self that is better than our worst Self. Then we can talk about being well with each other.
Centering in the Self is -TherapeuticLiving.