The set up
It is probable that you are not going to like the answer because it doesn’t agree with what you already know is the answer. But it is by this disagreement that the answer is true.
the exposure of the modern bias
Imagine a statement that you already knew was correct…
How would you know it was correct?
Literally ask yourself this experimental question.
What answer did you give yourself?
If you have gotten this far into this post, then it is because you are involved intentionally with your mental health as mental health. This is to say that you were not really looking for a definition of mental health, and if you were and you are still reading, then the definition that you have of mental health is correct, and you do not need me to give you one.
This is what we are dealing with every time we consider “mental health”.
the stage
In our modern world, there are two ways to understand and thereby go about dealing with things of mental health:
- they are not me
- they are me
No right or wrong answer exists. Rather, if there is a right or wrong answer to mental health, and a proper way for what we are to do with the experience of it, then we are involved with a problem that “is not me”, the problem of me trying to be or come to terms with something that I (you, the person, etc..) inherently know “is not me”.
There is no way around this fact, because any concept I would have of mental health that must be defined is necessarily and at all times a mental health that I am gaining from something else. By my very action of putting it into definition I am enacting a proof of “Other”. This is a phenomenological staple.
This is the nature of knowing reality and the foundation of mental health, the thing that is itself.
truth and reality
The reality of the matter is often shown by people who are experiencing problems with their mental health; they are not concerned with what they are thinking about it, or, often are over-concerned with it but in a way that avoids what is actually happening, i.e., they are trying not to think of it. Typically, people only want the problem to be gone, and this usually has to do with seeking help from someone else.
Of course they just want the problem gone; it wouldn’t be a real problem if they did not.
However, if a person could handle the issue they are experiencing around their mental health then, de facto, is was not a real problem, or, it was only a problem to the extent that the solution was not come about by adhering to a definition, but by knowing something that could not be contained or addressed by the definition: the solution that exceeded the need for the problem to be operative in the person’s experience as a problem.
This is why we have a blooming industry around mental health issues: it is a real problematic phenomenon.
experience
The truth is that if we are dealing with mental health then it is happening in the way things are experienced, which is never anything larger than the experience itself. If there is something outside of the person, then it is experienced as experience as not outside, which is to say, it is only defined that way, and a person is ‘enacting’ a certain relationship with the definition as their experience. This is to say, certain things that are part of a person’s experience are ‘experienced’ as not part of their experience due to or evidenced by the definition.
For example, in as much as a person seeks help for depression, say, they are enacting a kind of belief about the nature of depression that they do not know what is happening. They thus are seeking a solution (knowledge) from something that is definitively outside of them.
Mental health is the experience of seeking definition in reality for mental problems.
This might sound like a definition, and it is of course a definition or at least has some of its fimbriae in definition, but if the definition makes sense to you, then you did not need the definition, it was not required, and so the definition is largely meaningless for the function of definition: it was unneeded and the meaning it conveyed was already known; it was more a validation of known knowledge than any new information. Nonetheless, you may have the experience that you have come upon something new, something you did not know, but this experience cannot be contained by another definition of what that experience was.
the non-philosophical event
Some philosophers have written about this kind of situation as an ‘event”. At each juncture of this kind of experience what actually happens exceeds any sort of meaning, and by this every definition is an approximation, or what philosophers call sufficient.
In this way psychology is sufficient where mental health is necessary. And, in so much as we are involved with mental health issues, psychology is always merely offering sufficient solutions, which, on the very practical ground, is the attempt to demand necessity compliant with sufficiency.
Getting a little more deep into the philosophical waters, the gap, void, or lacuna which is presented by the failure of representational definition is the basis of mental problem, the ‘epistemological rupture’, if you will, out of which or in reaction against which diagnostic and theoretical efforts grow. Using the terms of the philosopher Alain Badiou, such theories attempt to ‘suture’ the rupture that is the event by which reality becomes constituted as a social phenomena. But these kinds of events are merely sufficient, where the actual experience of mental health is necessary. Modern science then capitalizes upon and exploits the failure for the furthering of modern reality.
This development is organized by the Nonphilosphical principle of a Unilateral Duality. An experience of things where one manner includes what is excluded, and one manner excludes everything that is not included. Mental health is the name of the category that includes what is excluded, experientially as well as practically, or in practice.
If this definition does not make sense, if you are seeing flaws in the logic, or you are thinking of a different definition of it, then, again, the definition was unneeded, and you already know what mental health is. And by this knowing the explanation of what is happening presented by mental health philosophy is true. This is the case even if you think that you do not know what mental health is; this forms the basis by which we may discover mental health and mental issue, or the manner by which mental issues can be reckoned as such.
In all cases, you already know what mental health is. The question is then one, not of the truth of the matter, but of belief, or what we call subjectivity.
In other words, the problem.
If we are discussing what a proper definition of mental health is between us, then we are involved with finding a social convention for the allocation of scarce resources, and are not really being involved with mental health itself. Rather, in such real negotiation we are involved with the contents of mental health, its real material, which is founded in scarcity.
From here mental health philosophy begins as a total explanation of all things that concern mental health as a knowable thing and accounts for all things that can be said to be involved with mental health.
- Interventions become explainable as to their activities, meanings, and actions, socially, personally, and experientially.
- Psychology becomes explainable and knowable as such, as to why things occur and what is happening in its efforts.
mental health philosophy, coming to mind near you