What is mental health anyway?
What is Mental Health?
The Mayo Clinic has a great definition: “Mental health is the overall wellness of how you think, behave and manage your feelings. A mental health condition may be present when patterns or changes in thinking, feeling, or behaving cause distress or disrupt a person's ability to do daily activities…There is no standard measure across all cultures that says when a behavior becomes a problem. What might be acceptable in one culture may be a cause for concern in another.”
When we talk about mental health, we are talking about how you think, behave, and feel. When those things are impacting your life negatively, you may benefit from mental health care.
It’s important to note that our expectations around mental health are defined within a culture, and that mental health is often about meeting certain cultural expectations. In this light, it is odd that mental health is something everyone talks about as if we all know and agree upon what exactly it is. In reality, mental health is a somewhat elusive, arbitrary concept. The nature of, and even the existence of, mental health as a concept has been debated in one way or another for centuries.
A significant aspect to the debate is that mental health is hard to quantify or measure. Physical health and illnesses are usually defined by quantifiable and measurable biomarkers; temperature, weight, blood pressure, etc. But mental health issues rarely have objective tests. There is no “mental‑health thermometer,” blood test, or brain scan that definitively confirms or rules out most mental disorders on its own. The tests we do have are all usually only correlational or probabilistic, not diagnostic (except for the case of psychoactive substances). And the tests we do have aren’t able to fully capture or explain how the observed measures affect a person’s inner life.
What we have instead is largely self‑reported data. We rely on a person’s own account of what is hindering their life, their relationships, and their sense of self. This is all very subjective, meaning that it depends on their personal experience rather than on an outside observer’s measurement. The subjective nature means that you are the only expert in the world on your own experiences. Working with a mental health professional should be a collaborative process, to address what is important to you, to get to the goals that you define.
Mike O'Rourke is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker Candidate in Montana, available for in-person and telehealth therapy. Book a session or consultation.