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The Issue Of Mental Health
Mental health is a phrase that gets tossed about a lot -- this is true especially during the few decades prior to this one -- but its full meaning often gets shorted. Casual mental health discussions usually focus on significant disorders: schizophrenic condition, bipolar condition, sociopathic tendencies, even Alzheimer's disease. But what gets left out in these sorts of discussions is how mental health affects each of our lives, without exception.
The emphasis when considering mental health is usually about disorder. The presence of a condition means a person is mentally unwell;lacking a condition means mental health is in order.
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A couple of problems exist with thinking this way. The first is that many people who actually do have mental disorders don't get diagnosed. There are scores of undiagnosed mentally ill in the world.
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.
Being mentally healthy means a number of things: coping successfully with the setbacks life invariably presents; healthy relationships with loved ones; functional relations regular acquaintances -- coworkers, for example; and integrating successfully into general society. These traits can certainly be absent in people who don't show symptoms or indications of mental 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.
The counter to opening up definitions of mental illness to include typical dysfunctions, and encouraging more mental health treatment in the process, is that it would be overkill, would be intrusive, would be comparable to medicating large segments of the population at large. But is this really true? Mental health doesn't have to be oppressive or medicating. This isn't some sort of suggestion that pharmaceuticals should be dispensed in greater quantities than they already are.
Mental health treatment, at its core, should emphasize the teaching of coping techniques. This is different than changing a person's reality. Let the reality remain the same: just change the dysfunctional strategies and methods people use to cope. This approach needn't involve using pharmaceutical treatment at all. Mental health treatment has a long history, and during much of that history pharmaceuticals weren't even available. People don't need to use pharmaceuticals to treat basic emotional and psychological functioning. Let's get that truth out in the open, where it belongs.
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