Mental health is almost always spoken about from a starting point of mental illness. We know all about what bad mental health is. But what does good mental health look like? From Maslow’s self-actualization to Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety, we can explore the possibilities of psychological well-being and discover that meaning and calm through psychological storms is the key to positive mental health, writes Paul G. Mattiuzzi
While I was in graduate school in the late 1970’s, a short-lived, student-run newsletter published under the banner: Freedom From Disabling Anxiety Press – a play on the common “Free Press” moniker.
We were training to diagnose the human condition in terms of a nosology founded on a medical model that defined “mental health” as the absence of psychiatric illness. The term “mental health” refers to disorder, disease and infirmity, and not actual health or well-being. Positive psychological health is referenced in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) only by way of a code number for “no diagnosis.”
As students of psychology (not psychiatry), we were also aware that “mental health” is a misnomer for another reason. Adaptive human functioning involves more than just thoughts and cognitions, our mental life. To identify both the healthy and the troubled souls among us, it is more accurate to refer to mental, emotional, behavioral, social and bio-psychological health.
The term psychological health includes all of the above, and it enables a discussion about what people who fall on the positive end of that axis actually look like.
Adaptive human functioning involves more than just thoughts and cognitions, our mental life.
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