Question

One of the goals of counseling psychology is to help individuals attain and maintain good mental health. What are some of the key distinctions between the concepts of mental health vs. mental illness that a counseling psychologist would want to know?

Answer 1

The key distinction between mental health and mental illness that everyone seems to forget is that mental health is universal, i.e., everyone has mental health, just like how everyone has health. Mental illness refers to a wide range of disorders, that play a part in affecting our mood, our behavior as well as the thoughts we have. Mental illness is just like physical illness, as in people don't always suffer from it, but it does create a struggle or a conflict within a person's psyche from time to time just like physical health disorders.

Mental health refers to our feelings, our thoughts, our familial interactions, our social interactions and how we behave in our daily life. It's only when these feelings and interactions take a turn for the worse, affected by external and/or internal factors, and the person involved starts getting affected mentally, does this turn to mental illness.

What most people think is that mental illness is not a disease and that it is sort of a taboo to talk about it, that it will just go away because they are choosing to ignore it. This reaction, that is still prevalent in a majority of people, is actually making things far worse because mental illness is just like physical illness, only, it does not show any obvious symptoms other than in a person's behavior. This means that the diagnosis of a mental illness or disorder requires conscious effort from the psychologist as well as the person who is suffering from the illness. Ignoring it and hoping it goes away doesn't work with physical illnesses and it doesn't work with mental unhealthiness either.

What a psychologist needs to clearly understand is the difference between good mental health and high mental health. They are oftentimes the same thing, but sometimes, there comes a case where a person may be suffering from a disorder, that, in its initial stages is actually helping the person in life, such as the bipolar disorder, thus giving him/her high mental health. It is only when the disorder runs unchecked for some time, without preventive measures being taken, that the person suffers from high mental illness as well. There may well be cases that even without any disorder or disease, a person is just generally of low mental health, due to their lifestyle, life choices, their routine or maybe due to some anomaly in their life. The psychologist needs to be aware of how to diagnose a person whether they have high/low mental health and high/low/no mental illness.