What is mental health?

What does it mean to be “mentally healthy”?

Are symptoms the signs of “abnormal” behavior, requiring pharmaceuticals, psychotherapy, or more?

Physical health and mental health are different. When you have a physical symptom: a painful bruise, extreme fatigue, endless coughing, etc., it’s likely you are ill or that your body needs to heal. 

The same cannot be said for mental health. Everyone gets sad, angry, or paranoid. Everyone gets sudden bursts of energy or sudden spells of despair. Not everyone knows what it’s like to have cancer or to break a bone, but we all know what insecurity and sadness feel like.

In the mental health world, the point that these emotions, thoughts, behaviors, or feelings become “abnormal” and thus diagnostic is roughly when they are so extreme or disruptive that they interfere with, in a negative way, a person’s functioning, well-being, or relationships with others.

And so, we imagine the man who is suffering from depression. He is lethargic and emotionless, almost unable to move from his bed. We imagine the attempts to “treat” this man with antidepressant drugs or through the work of clinicians. 

Finally, when he is feeling “better,” he is no longer depressed. He’s able to live life like he used to.

He’s finally mentally well. 

Right?

Unlike a broken leg, mental health “symptoms” are guaranteed to come back. This man is going to feel sad again. He’s going to feel low on energy again. It may get so extreme and disruptive that he’ll need to receive “treatment” all over again, particularly if he does not make any changes to what is actually causing the depression in his life. 

On and on the cycle goes for our depressed man and so many others, many of whom may not be “diagnosable” with an identifiable mental disorder, but are still struggling with bows of mental health challenges nonetheless.

There’s no doubt that there are extreme mental illnesses out there: disorders like borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia come to mind (though I worry we lack a complete understanding of these as well).

Yet, it can’t be denied that, unlike physical injury or illness, basically every human is guaranteed to experience, to some extent, the same feelings, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions as those society deems to be “mentally ill.” 

Life is GREAT. 

But life is also challenging and uncomfortable. 

Life will make you smile and laugh.

It’ll also break you down and force you to be strong.

Some people respond better than others, for a variety of reasons. Some people hide their struggles better than others.

But the idea that “normal mental health” is the same as “zero symptoms” ignores the reality of being HUMAN. It tells us that there is something wrong with our inherent being. 

Mental health isn’t the absence of symptoms. A life of pure comfort and zero challenge isn’t attainable. And if it were, our human nature would lash out against it. 

It’s time to change the conversation on mental health. 

It’s time to embrace our struggles and challenges as the conditions of the game we’re all born into. Our challenges do not need to weigh us down; they can be (and often are) the fuel that gives life meaning. They burn in us a fire of desire to conquer what lays in front of us.

In doing so, we discover how much we’re truly capable of.

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