By Dr. Evan Parks—How would you feel about turning to a mental health professional for help when that individual might not have a clear definition of mental health? Both mental health and medical professionals learn about mental illness in their training, but they are not often taught what it means to be mentally healthy. A survey of more than 85,000 mental health and medical professionals revealed that less than 5% heard even one lecture on the mind and how the mind functions correctly.
What do you think would happen if you walked into your local mental health clinic or perhaps your physician’s office and said, “I want to be mentally healthy. What do I need to do? And I would like to know how close am I to being healthy.” You might be met with a blank stare and hear some vague answer, such as, “Well, if you don’t have anxiety or depression, and you are not hearing voices or have an addiction, I guess you are pretty good. Don’t worry about trying to be mentally healthy.” The basis of this answer is that if there are no signs of a mental disorder, like depression, you must be healthy.
Is It All in Our Genes?
There are two problems with this concept of mental health. First, stating that mental health is just the absence of mental illness does not provide us with a definition of mental wellbeing. Secondly, there are many people who do not have a specific mental health problem or disorder who are clearly not mentally healthy.
Consider this common example of unhealthy parenting. What is wrong with a mother who shows love and affection to one of her children, but completely ignores the needs of her other two children? She refuses to hold them, encourage them, speak comforting words to them. She points out how special her loved child is and tells people what a disappointment the other two are. This mother sleeps well at night, has no conscience that seems to bother her, no anxiety, addiction, depression, or other identifiable sign of mental illness. She is clearly a disturbed person, one who brings emotional harm to others. Should we have scientists start looking for an “unloving mother” disease? Should they try to discover genetic markers of being uncaring, or find a medication to correct a chemical imbalance that causes her to reject two children but love one child? Probably not.
When we define mental illness like we try to define problems such as diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, or thyroid dysfunction, then we have fallen for the trap of making our dysfunctional behavior something that is not in our control or our responsibility. We can then claim that our out of control emotions, thoughts, and behavior are a disease, like cancer. If mental illness was disease, anyone could develop a mental disorder and there is no predicting why it happens. There simply is no scientific evidence that points to a brain disease at the root of mental illness. We recover from mental illness primarily because of changes in our behavior, relationships, thinking, and emotional flexibility. These changes lead to changes in the brain and nervous system.
Moving Toward Mental Wellbeing
When our behavior, choices, thinking, and ways of relating are narrowly looked at as only the function of our neurobiology, then we intentionally ignore the fact that we are ethical, social, psychological, and biological beings who can make choices about how our basics needs are met and how we respond the problems that occur. We can either respond to problems in a way that make or problems worse or better. The same is true of our needs. We can meet our needs in ways that are effective and lead to satisfaction, or we can attempt to meet our needs in ways that lead to our dysfunction and distress.
The over 450 mental disorders that are listed in the official classification publications are not disorders that are each unique, separate conditions as we see with medical diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. These mental disorder classifications, it has been argued by a growing number of psychologists and psychiatrists, make it harder for us to recognize that there are basic problems that underlie all mental disorders. The lack of mental health leads to mental illness. As we move toward mental wellbeing, many mental disorders represented in the classification systems are resolved. What we need is a clear picture of what it means to be mentally healthy and then teach this model of mental wellbeing to healthcare professional and the people who are struggling with mental health issues.
Thanks, Evan. We have a student in the ThM program in the Pastoral Theology and Counseling Dept that is wrestling with the approach to her research. She is convinced that she should start from a “definition” of what constitutes mental health, but she is only able to do so from a negative perspective, that is, the mentally healthy person is one who does not suffer from mental disorder. Not very satisfying.
Society is set up the same dysfunctional way, because there is a pay off in it for someone. That is why there are groups which are viewed as more or less talented and highly valued “golden children”, who have greater control over social and material resources, and then there are the traditional scapegoated groups, who are relatively powerless. That is one of the reasons society in general does not like to look at what happens in “dysfunctional” families, because it is like the water fish swim in, it is a microcosm of society, and so people absorb pathological values as “just the way it is.”