What Is Mental Health?
May is Mental Health Awareness Month.
How is mental health defined within your organization?
How aligned are your mental health related strategies with your definition?
Here are a random selection of mental health definitions generated by a Google search:
From Mosby’s Medical, Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary, Fourth Edition
A relative state of mind in which a person who is healthy is able to cope with and adjust to the recurrent stresses of everyday living in an acceptable way.
From the Oxford Dictionary:
A person’s condition with regard to their psychological and emotional well-being.
From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices.
From Medical News Today:
Mental health refers to cognitive, behavioral, and emotional well-being. It is all about how people think, feel, and behave. People sometimes use the term “mental health” to mean the absence of a mental disorder.
From Galderisi, et al. 2017:
Mental health is a dynamic state of internal equilibrium which enables individuals to use their abilities in harmony with universal values of society. Basic cognitive and social skills; ability to recognize, express and modulate one’s own emotions, as well as empathize with others; flexibility and ability to cope with adverse life events and function in social roles; and harmonious relationship between body and mind represent important components of mental health which contribute, to varying degrees, to the state of internal equilibrium. Silvana Galderisi. Andreas Heinz. Marianne Kastrup. Julian Beezhold. Norman Sartorius. 2017. A Proposed New Definition of Mental Health. Psychiatr. Pol. 2017; 51(3): 407–411. Available electronically at: from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317685986_A_proposed_new_definition_of_mental_health. Accessed April 30, 2022.
U.S Surgeon General:
Mental health is a state of successful performance of mental function, resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and an ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.
From the American Psychiatric Association:
Mental Health…involves effective functioning in daily activities resulting in:
- Productive activities (work, school, caregiving).
- Healthy relationships.
- Ability to adapt to change and cope with adversity.
Mental health is the foundation for emotions, thinking, communication, learning, resilience and self-esteem. Mental health is also key to relationships, personal and emotional well-being and contributing to community or society.
From Wikipedia:
Mental health encompasses emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It influences cognition, perception, and behavior. It also determines how an individual handles stress, interpersonal relationships, and decision-making. Mental health includes subjective well-being, perceived self-efficacy, autonomy, competence, intergenerational dependence, and self-actualization of one’s intellectual and emotional potential, among others. From the perspectives of positive psychology or holism, mental health may include an individual’s ability to enjoy life and to create a balance between life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience. Cultural differences, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories all affect how one defines “mental health”.
From McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts:
The term ‘mental health’ implies the absence of illness or disorder.
From the Great Lakes Psychology Group:
We can think of mental health as the ability to adapt in challenging situations by effectively managing our thoughts and emotions in order to continue pursuing worthy goals and behaving in line with our values. Mental health is not something you have, it is something you practice. Mental health can be broken down further into three major components: cognitive health, emotional health, and behavioral health. Each of these components interacts with and influences the others, and they are all imperative to overall wellbeing.
From the World Health Organization:
The World Health Organization (WHO) conceptualizes mental health as a “state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community”.
Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I think it is important to note that not one of the above definitions describes mental health as just being a focus on mental illness. Yet most of the conversation today, especially in the workplace, is a focus on mental ill-health, mental disorders or mental illness.
Building mental health awareness includes building an awareness that mental health is more than just the absence of mental illness. It is, in fact, so much more.
When used as a broad umbrella like term, mental health consists of mental wellness (aka mental wellbeing or positive mental health), psychological/psychological distress and of course, mental illness. The wise employer today addresses not only mental illness, but mental wellness and psychological/psychosocial distress as well.
Since mental health is about more than mental illness, addressing mental illness only will not get the job done. It is well established that the elimination of mental illness will not create mental health. Mental health and mental illness, while related, are two separate concepts each with its own spectrum and continuum. The mental health continuum ranges from languishing on the low end to flourishing on the high end. And given today’s economic emphasis on value add by employees, employers need employees to be flourishing, rather than languishing.
