Thursday, April 15, 2010

Mental Health

We mentioned today that so much, historically, of the efforts of psychology as a discipline have been focused on the understanding of mental illness. By comparison, far far less energy has been spent on trying to define and describe mental health. (I mentioned Abraham Maslow and Karl Menninger as exceptions.)

What, then, are the constituents of mental health?

5 comments:

JJR said...

I am 100% certain that one essential quality for mental health is resilience. Without it mental health is impossible because human beings would lack the ability to bounce back from the constant conflicts (internal and external), stressors, tragedies, and adversities that are inherent to living.

Anonymous said...

I agree with JJR on the resilience. I would, however, like to add something in the way of clarifying. I believe that mental health is what allows us to maintain survival in the social and biological sense. A mind that fails to 'work' properly is like a computer with a screwy processor- it ceases to do what it should. Should? I'm not trying to assert some objective purpose of humanity, just that, in survival terms, a mind we would deem 'healthy' is one that is best equipped (and most resilient!) to respond to stimuli in a productive manner (to interface with the world in a way that ensures your and your society's survival).

corax said...

lacksagoo, i am going to push you a bit farther here as well. please take it as a compliment to your intellect, rather than some perversity on my part.

you are taking a hard-line evolutionary-biology position on this, and nobody can fault your logic there. but is survival the ultimate goal [i.e. even at the expense of other goals] in this situation? the argument could be made that the sociopath [ASPD] is 'better' at survival because not 'hindered' by such things as conscience, compassion, etc; but no modern psychologist that i know of doesn't consider ASPD a disorder rather than 'normal' or 'healthy.'

can i get you to refine your thinking further here?

Chris Fitz said...

I'd also like to add that if you approach something from the hard-line evolutionary-biology position, which is often argued on the basis of an a priori materialistic reductionism, you open yourself up to a foundational incoherence and irrationality. Alvin Plantinga calls it "self-referential incoherence." It can be understood broadly in this sense: if something is true if and only if there is empirical evidence to support it, then there must likewise be empirical evidence to support such an assertion itself, self-referentially. Since there isn't, it fails. The argument is much better delineated, and much more thoroughly for that matter, by Plantinga, but that's my rather rough way of putting it. Check it out for yourself.

Chris Fitz said...

I'd also like to add that if you approach something from the hard-line evolutionary-biology position, which is often argued on the basis of an a priori materialistic reductionism, you open yourself up to a foundational incoherence and irrationality. Alvin Plantinga calls it "self-referential incoherence." It can be understood broadly in this sense: if something is true if and only if there is empirical evidence to support it, then there must likewise be empirical evidence to support such an assertion itself, self-referentially. Since there isn't, it fails. The argument is much better delineated, and much more thoroughly for that matter, by Plantinga, but that's my rather rough way of putting it. Check it out for yourself.