Mental Health Awareness Month: What is Mental Health?
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Mental Health Month provides a great opportunity to focus additional importance on mental health. The World Health Organization defines mental health as a state of well-being that allows individuals to cope with life’s stressors, realize their abilities, learn and work effectively, and contribute to their community. This is a helpful yet broad definition that understandably may leave you wrestling with more questions about mental health in general or about your own personal mental state.
What specifically contributes to my overall mental health? How do I know if I’m mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What causes someone to be mentally unhealthy? Can someone be mentally unhealthy without being “mentally ill”? How do I achieve and maintain a state of mental health and wellbeing? On and on the list may go.
The concept of mental health can feel like a rather elusive or ambiguous notion to many people. Because our mind is a seemingly invisible and intangible entity, it can feel difficult for most to conceptualize it and to fully understand what all gets categorized or lumped in with mental health. Consider your own physical body for a moment – you have muscles and organs that, if you want to keep them healthy and strong, you need to regularly challenge them through lifting weights or some form of physical movement while also balancing with support such as massages, ice baths, rest, or consuming adequate dietary nutrition. It is a balance of intentional challenge accompanied with support. In the same way, our minds are set up with mental and emotional faculties or “muscles” that require a similar balance of safe challenge with accompanied support.
A brief note on what mental health is not… Mental health is not clearly indicated by the absence of mental disorders or diagnoses. The absence of a mental health diagnosis does not automatically equate to mental health or wellbeing just as the presence of a mental health diagnosis does not necessarily equate to poor mental health given the unfortunate reality of misdiagnoses. This blog will hopefully give you a crash course understanding of your own state of mental health and wellbeing, regardless of whether you have a mental health diagnosis or not, so that you can have a better gauge of yourself, for yourself.
Core Domains of Mental Wellbeing (a general list):
If mental health is the house, the core domains listed above act as the individual rooms in that house. Though you may spend different amounts of time in each room of your home and for differing purposes, each individual room still requires your attention and care on a regular basis for the whole house to be well-kept. If your bedroom remains unmanaged, unclean, and steadily accumulating more clutter, it likely will impact your mood when you exist in that space and the thoughts of an unclean room possibly linger and loom in your mind even when you’re in other rooms of the house. You may begin to avoid your bedroom altogether which only exacerbates the problem. If the basement has black mold growing in it, it does not just affect the basement space. It impacts the air quality throughout the whole house. Each room has unique qualities, purposes, and requirements of care, but all the rooms are connected as a whole house.
The same is true for your mental health. The Wheel of Life is a tool that can be used to get a visual and more tangible gauge of the metaphorical rooms within your personal house of mental health. This article includes a Wheel of Life template below for your reference, but you can also find a variety of Wheel of Life templates online that may suit your style better. I encourage you to take 5-10 minutes to reflect on the Wheel of Life and allow it to bring insight into the degree of satisfaction you currently hold toward varying areas of your life and functioning. Note that the categories on the provided Wheel of Life template do not match identically with the list of core domains offered above.
Instruction:
Consider each of the core domains mapped out in the Wheel of Life. You will rank how satisfied you are in each category based on a scale of 1-10. Color in each category up to the level of satisfaction that you feel in each area. You may use one color for all of it or different colors for each category. Some people are surprised by their responses once they get to see it in a physical form like this. Once complete with that portion, identify the area(s) where you feel less satisfied and/or where you seem to be struggling the most. Either through personal reflection or with the help of a friend, family member, mentor, or counselor, identify action steps that will help move you toward your goals in this area.
Key markers of mental health, wellbeing, and balance (based on the experiential observations of a mental health professional):
Resilience is a key determinant of mental health. People who are highly resilient hold a genuine belief that essentially, all of life’s problems are “figure-out-able”.
Psychological flexibility is another key marker of mental wellbeing. This is the ability to adjust control when things do not go as expected and to adapt well to adverse situations while remaining deeply connected to your personal core values. [Below is an infographic of psychological flexibility as laid out in the Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) model. By reading through this map, you may gain insight into areas you are strong versus where you may lack].
Autonomy. This is a sort of marriage between healthy self-regulation and healthy co-regulation. It is the ability to be alone well and also to be with others well. Humans need both but many experience detrimental lack in either one or the other. Genuine autonomy can be rare to find but is a great indicator of mentally and emotionally healthy people.
A neutral self-concept. A person steps into problematic territory when they begin to think too highly or too lowly about themself. Holding an overly positive perspective of self can often lead to disproportionate emotional distress when failures, mistakes, rejections, etc. present themselves. Holding an overly negative perspective of self can often limit a person from trying at many things in life, which makes life rather small. Establishing and holding a neutral perspective of self creates a more reality-based image of life, removes pressures, lessens the fear(s) around accidentally breaking from the character you’ve developed within your mind, and ultimately cultivates greater feelings of personal freedom.
A regulated nervous system. Cool, calm, and collected is not a marker of mental health. Rather, regulation is. A person can be experiencing immense external life stress and yet be fully able to regulate him or herself. A person can be angry while being regulated, overjoyed while remaining regulated, grieved and regulated, anxious and regulated, and the list goes on. Regulation does not mean expressionless or without emotion, and mental and emotional health does not mean calm, peaceful, and happy all the time. True mental and emotional wellbeing are characterized by flexibility and the ability to regulate regardless of what you may be experiencing within the human spectrum of emotion.
Mental health is important because the state of your internal world is what will overflow onto the external experiences and relationships you have in life, shaping your world and your experience of it. This blog offers an aerial view of mental and emotional health and therefore does not offer an extensive or exhaustive breakdown of mental health or consideration of all factors. However, the hope is that it at least gives you a general guardrail toward self-exploration as it pertains to your own mental health or possibly the mental health of someone you are in relationship with.
If this blog has raised deeper questions, heightened curiosity, or concerns about your own mental health state, consider getting established with a counselor of your own to further explore some of these things within the safety of a professional therapeutic relational dynamic.
About the Author
Hannah Lemmon
M.A. Ed, LPC
Encompass Therapist
Hannah Lemmon holds a Master of Clinical Mental Health Counseling degree from Malone University and is a trauma-informed Licensed Professional Counselor. Hannah is passionate about the integration of faith-based components into therapeutic treatment as it helps to facilitate sustainable health and healing within the mental, emotional, physical, relational, and spiritual elements of her clients' lives. She uses an integrative and attachment-focused approach to meet the unique needs of individuals of all ages and backgrounds.