What does mental health REALLY mean?

Mental Health 

Take a minute to write down the first five things that come to mind when you hear the words "mental health".

Mental health has become one of those phrases that's used so much it's pretty much lost all meaning. Ask ten people on the street what mental health means and you'll get eleven different answers. Most commonly and perhaps most ironically, mental health is used to talk about mental illness. Take a look at the list of words you wrote (shame if you didn't do it!). Probably the word depression is on there, maybe anxiety, PTSD, maybe psychiatry or psychology. Lets imagine that a million people do the same exercise, what percent do you think would write passion, compared to depression? Joy, compared to illness? Love, compared to anxiety?

Here's the first thing we need to realise about mental health:

Being mentally healthy isn’t the same as not having any mental illnesses.

In other words, the absence of mental illness does not imply the presence of mental health.

Consider the World Health Organisation's definition of health: 

a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity

If we've known this since 1948, why did it take until 1998 for positive psychology to arrive and for science to seriously start considering the "health" part of mental health? And that 50-year gap doesn't just represent lost time either, it represents roughly 35,600,000 suicides too.

But regardless the delay, Positive Psychology, pioneered by former American Psychological Association president Martin Seligman, represents the first time since its inception that psychology has attempted to find empirical data about what makes life truly worth living, here's what they found...

Components of Mental Health

Mental health and wellbeing consists of five key areas: positive emotions, sense of engagement, healthy relationships, sense of meaning and purpose, and a sense of achievement. These can be remembered with the pneumonic PERMA.   

You can test your current levels of PERMA using the PERMA-P Questionnaire [PDF]. You could even take the questionnaire multiple times across your self-improvement journey to track what progress you’re making. 

Positive Emotions 

The Positive Emotion component of mental health is simply that. It means that mentally healthy people experience positive feelings more frequently than they do negative feelings. That isn't to say that the ideal state of being is 100% positive emotion and 0%, simply that we should keep the ratio in check in our day to day lives as our brains are hard wired to notice the negative more readily than the positive, for evolutionary reasons. Research by Barbara Fredrickson suggests a good ratio is 3:1, and that successful business teams communicate positive emotions 6:1, though this has recently been contested.

Engagement

Have you ever been so into something, that when you’re working on it time seems to have stopped? Maybe you were playing vidya and thought it had been fifteen minutes, but when you looked at the clock, hours had past. That sensation of being utterly wrapped up in something is called flow. Flow is a key part of a sense of engagement, which in turn is a key part of mental wellbeing. Engage and get involved with projects and ideas that give you a sense of flow.

Relationships

When was the last time you laughed until it hurt? When was the last time you thought deeply about life, the universe, and everything? Chances are that both of those things happened with other people around. Very few people are truly happy with a solitary life, positive relationships form a big part of mental health. Indeed, loneliness has been linked to ill physical health also. Seek out people who make you happy!   

Meaning

Given the choice would you choose to live a meaningless life? Who would?! Meaning and purpose are key ingredients of mental health. They consist of three things: comprehension, significance, and service. Comprehension is our need to understand the world and our place in it. Significance is our need to have values and to feel valued in return. Service is our need for highly motivating “transcendent” goals – which simply as humans we like to have goal which serve something bigger than ourselves, like our communities or god etc. (Protip: I'll be publishing a three-part extravaganza on meaning and purpose soon, follow me!)

Achievement

Achievement is exactly that – we like to win. Lose too often and we become dejected and pessimistic. As with negative emotions, our brains are evolutionarily wired to hold on to failure. Recognise this fact and celebrate your wins, no matter how small.   

Practical Exercises to Build Mental Health and Wellbeing   

Three Good Things

Three Good Things is a simple, empirically validated exercise that increases levels of happiness and decreases symptoms of depression over six months. All you have to do is: each night before you go to bed, write down three things that went well today and why you think they happened. Remember to write down the why, that’s the important part!   

Gratitude Letter

Gratitude Letter is again a simple, empirically validated exercise that increases levels of happiness and decreases symptoms of depression over a month. All you have to do is: Think of someone to whom you are grateful but have never properly thanked. Write them a letter outlining what they did for you, how you benefited and why you are thankful to them. You can deliver the letter if you want to but it is not necessary for the exercise.   

Best Possible Self 

Best Possible Self is a creative writing exercise that has empirical evidence to show that it “significantly increases subjective wellbeing” It asks that you think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined.   

At My Best

Write roughly one side of A4 paper which tell a positive story of you at your best. Read this story once a day for a week, reflecting on what made you your best in that situation: your character strengths, your values and virtues, your relationships etc.   

Signature Strengths

Reflect on the character strengths you think you exemplify, or take a character strengths profile like the VIA-IS (www.viacharacter.org). Pick one of your top five results and commit to using it in a new way this week.   

Good luck, and good mental health to you!

References 

King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798-807.   

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Simon & Schuster.

Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60, 410–421.

The World Health Organisation. Definition of Health, www.who.int/about/definition/en/print.html. Accessed 25/08/2016.

Top photo by Rob Sheridan. Bottom photo from here.