A Mental Health definition thread

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > A Mental Health definition thread

PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Muscle Tracer posted:

Thanks for making this thread, Josef. I have encountered a distinction that I have found useful, albeit in a human resources context, between the states of "mental health" and "mental fitness." I think this is a useful metaphor because most people have a much more intuitive understanding of physical health than mental health, but the parallels are actually really apt.

From that perspective, your mental health is a lot like your physical health. You're "unhealthy" if there's something about your body, or your mind, that is endangering you or causing you pain. With your body, this might be a malfunctioning organ or a virus or an injury, and with your mind this might be anything from a delusion to really bad feelings. But just because you're not in pain or danger doesn't mean you've reached the other end of the spectrum: you can do a lot more to help your mind be more resilient, capable, etc., or you can take actions that aren't strictly "unhealthy" but are definitely not going to make you more fit. In this instance I'd define "fit" as "able to do more", with sort of an open end towards the high end of the spectrum: a fit body can run longer or lift more, and a fit mind can experience a greater range of emotion, endure more, remember more, etc.

While I find this analogy really useful, I know plenty of people who struggle with it. The idea of being in poor mental health is so stigmatized that even when your mind is obviously in a lot of pain, people don't want to acknowledge that as poor health or illness--only the malfunctioning organ, not the virus or injury, is ACTUALLY "mental health." I think recognizing that poor health can come in many degrees of severity and duration is a critical step towards destigmatizing the idea and helping people be more honest with themselves about their situation.

Interested to see where this thread goes.

Yeah, I would agree with this overall, and I think it can be useful to break it down into multiple parts here. I look at it a little differently but mostly the same. On one end you have diagnosable conditions that benefit from treatment: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, addiction, etc. That's sort of the equivalent of a broken leg, or cancer, or what-have-you. It's going to interfere with your life significantly, and has the possibility of being very harmful or deadly, and you basically need to treat it. But that's only one aspect of mental health or mental wellness. The other side is more like physical fitness, as you describe, and I think this is something where we need to work more on building awareness.

There's a whole range between "has a diagnosable mental illness" and "is resilient and in control of their emotions and is able to deal with stress and anxiety and frustration in a productive manner almost all the time." And just like you wouldn't say "oh, he's not got cancer or anything, he doesn't need to exercise" you wouldn't say "he's not mentally ill, he doesn't need to see a therapist or focus on mental wellness." We should normalize paying attention to and taking care of one's mental well-being even in the absence of mental illness, just as we largely have normalized getting exercise for physical health even in the absence of disease.

I think it's important to look at that distinction as we deal with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. One area where it's become particularly visible is on airliners, where incidents of passenger misbehaviour have skyrocketed. Mental illness -- in the sense of actual diagnosable disease -- likely did not expand by 20 times over the course of the pandemic. But they are not sufficiently mentally well/mentally fit (to use your metaphor) to handle everything that's going on, with an additionally stressful situation. If I say to you "could you please lift this 100 pound box into the back of my car" and you say "no, I can't, that's too heavy" that doesn't mean you're ill or disabled or broken in some way, it means you're not sufficiently fit to do that. If you try it, you might injure yourself. We are seeing that with mental health, I think: everything that's gone on recently has basically meant that we're asking people to "lift" a lot more, and a lot of them aren't "fit" enough to do it, and when one additional stressful situation is added abruptly, there occurs whatever the mental equivalent of throwing one's back out is.

I think we've made significant strides in de-stigmatizing mental illness, which is great, but it's not the whole solution. We also need to normalize working to better one's mental health in the absence of any particular problem or pathology, so when you need your mind to lift that extra weight, you can do it safely and don't end up duct-taped to an airliner seat after you bit a person. In a more general sense, we also need to be more understanding of people whose mental wellness might be a bit depleted at the moment. If I asked you to lift that 100 pound box into the back of my car and you said "no, I think I will injure myself," my response would be "okay, let's find a way to do it safely," not, "oh, c'mon, just do it you pussy."

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 04:56

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PT6A: Jan 5, 2006; Public school teachers are callous dictators who won't lift a finger to stop children from peeing in my plane

Mellow Seas posted:

I agree that people should know it�s important that they pay attention to their mental health, even if they�re �not mentally ill.�

But at the same time, I am extremely wary about applying anything about how we think of �physical fitness� to how we think about mental health. What we see with physical health is societal failures papered over with moralizing directed at the failures of individuals. Obesity rates have increased, what, fourfold over the last 50 years? This suggests that something about our society has changed in a way that makes physical fitness much more difficult for people to attain.

But a lot of people still seem to think of the obesity epidemic as if 30-40% of the population just �became� lazy and gluttonous around 1990. The successes in individuals, which are rare, are held over the heads of people who are not successful. Meanwhile, our society keeps demanding we sit in chairs eight hours a day and keeps showing us ads for McDonald�s every 10 minutes when we�re trying to watch the NBA Finals.

I�m afraid of a future where people who have never struggled with their mental health start telling ill people, �Why can�t you just feel better - it�s just [mental equivalent of calories] in, [mental equivalent of calories] out!�

To be fair, "fit" isn't the opposite of "overweight or obese" and that's a huge part of the problem with our perception of physical fitness. There are plenty of people who are overweight who are nonetheless strong and have good endurance and good general health, and plenty of skinny people who are not at all fit. How we address people who do not fit with our ideal of how bodies should look is a separate issue.

With mental health, largely, we're dealing with the equivalent of someone who can't climb two flights of stairs without getting winded, simply because they've never been asked or required to do anything to improve their mental fitness beyond "don't be disruptively crazy in public."

But I agree it's not easy to maintain that sort of fitness either physically or mentally, given what society expects of people. That's one thing that needs to change, for sure.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 22:38

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > A Mental Health definition thread