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What were the health and illness of children's in the past like?

What is the relationship between mental health and mental illness?

  • Longer version of question What are the distinctions between mental health and mental illness as conceptual frameworks for organizing knowledge and practice for human well-being? Comment(s) Health is much more than the absence of disease.

  • Answer:

    It's important to understand that the two can overlap. A person with a mental illness can be more mentally healthy than many people without mental illness. In the realm of physical disability, we have a South African Olympic runner who is a double amputee. The same can happen with psychiatric disabilities. One can minimize the effect of the disabling psychiatric condition through therapies like cognitive behaviour therapy, etc., and maximize one's potential for well-being by increasing activities that cause flow, practicing mindfulness and other attention focusing exercises, and using other positive psychology techniques involving gratitude, spirituality, helping others, etc.. Positive psychology (which is NOT positive thinking) is the science of what is right with people, character strengths, and what well-being is. This is where you can find for "conceptual frameworks for organizing knowledge and practice for human well-being."  You can get some information on this science at the University of Pennsylvania's http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/. If you'd like more try books by Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Sonja Lyubomirsky,

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I think that mental health and mental illness could be seen as two ends of a spectrum- everyone has a mind and a need for wellbeing- without or without mental illness. IF we start looking at mental well being from the perspective of psychiatry alone then we get into a needless normativity and measurement of human behaviour, which can actually never be measured in any conditions, except for the laboratory ones, which in fact never really happen in real life. Conceptually I even think that even so-called abnormal behaviour is also not really coming from a biological basis but a social one, which is acting at the site of the individual. When you look at health, how you want to define health and illness are not final ways actually. What I see as dsyfunctional behaviour is the inability to deal with your own emotions and spilling them on to others, and I do not see how any amount of medication can mend this situation. The only way is when people start looking at themselves and their own patterns and decide whether they are working for them or not. By believing the medical model, and by saying that, 'Oh since my dysfunctional behaviour is coming from a lack inside me, i ought to take this pill and it will take care of the rest' we actually think that the pill is capable of dealing with our life issues.  What is the intent of the quest is the bottom of the issue. Do you want health or are you looking at illness? Both will determine how you want to tackle the issue. There is enough work in the social sciences now to challenge the biological basis of 'mental illness'. TO what end your knowledge is directed determines the rest. Do you want to use knowledge for telling people that mental illness is real and they ought to get medicated or do you want to tell people that mental distress need not be seen as mental illness, but a cry of help and one should seek guidance accordingly? What is the goal of this knowledge seeking? I am not quite clear yet, but i have still tried to add my two penny bit here.

Hamsadhwani Prateeksha

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