The essence of mental health

Post Reply New Topic

according to the Oxford Handbook of clinical psychiatry

"Ideally, healthy humans have:
-An ability to love and be loved. Without this cardinal asset, human beings, more than all other mammals, fail to thrive.
-The power to embrace change and uncertainty without fear - and to face fear rationally and in a spirit of practical optimism
-A gift for risk-taking free from endless worst-case-scenario-gazing
-Stores of spontaneous joie de vivre, and a wide range of emotional responses (including negative emotions, such as anger; these may be important for motivation, as well as being a natural antidote to pain)
-Efficient contact with reality: not too little; not too much (As TS Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality,(
-A rich fantasy world enabling hope and creativity to flourish.
-A degree of self-knowledge to encourage the human exercising of the skill of repairing the self and others following harm
-The strength to say 'I am wrong' and to learn from experience
-An adequate feeling of security and status within society
-The ability to satisfy the requirements of the group, combined with a freedom to choose whether to exercise this ability
-Freedom of self-expression in whatever way he or she wants.
-The ability to risk enchantment and to feel a sense of awe
-The ability to gratify his own and others' desires
-A sense of humour to compensate should the foregoing be unavailable

Happiness need not be an ingredient of mental health....the above may also be seen as a sort of blueprint for our species' survival."

Section on autism:
"This neurodevelopmental disorder is, if severe, an antithesis of our definition of mental health"

I think being loved is key to being happy. If you don't know how to feel loved, it can impact your happiness.

Having AS doesn't make it impossible, but it causes problems because how you feel loved may not match how NTs experience it and you feel you're missing out on something.

If you have this, then the rest just falls into place. In your fantasies, at least.

I can't see this list as anything other than psychobabble. For a start, I've never encountered one person in real life who could tick even half the boxes. That's if we could ever decide exactly what aspects of reality a healthy person should ignore.

Maybe this person exists in the mind of those oh so smug, self-satisfied, nauseatingly narcissistic TV psychologists that the media frequently wheels out to utter meaningless platitudes. Now there's a 'rich fantasy world' for you. It is also a complete sham.

All these people have done is list their egotistical view of their own character traits. Don't forget these are people succesful in the fraudulant sham of a psuedoscience known as Psychiatry. No surprise, then, that 'conscience' isn't listed as a requirement of a mentally healthy human being.

Many of the traits are those needed to Win Friends And Influence People (in Important Places), rather than those that are needed to create, invent or discover something new.

Some of the traits appear to be dependant on the circumstances of your environment, not internal traits. Should we all be embarking on the global revolution required to ensure that everybody on earth has "a feeling of status and security withing society"? The catch here, for example is that as psycholigists know staus is a relative concept, the high status of some depends on the low status of others.

As long as you've still got your sense of humour, I suppose......

They seem to have had a good stab at the question, but I strongly suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Psychiatry.

It's all so static and fixed, isn't it? As if all you need to do is to make sure you can check all those boxes and you're "there." Clinical psychiatry is still in the dark ages, IMHO. Of course there's merit in a lot of those ideas, but paradigms come and go.

Oh well, I suppose they have to expound some kind of defined vision of the perfectly-balanced human, in the same way that political parties have to have a set of potted ideals - otherwise people might think they don't really know what they're doing.

As for autism being the antithesis of their definition of all that is wonderful and good about the human condition, here's one (suspected) Aspie who feels as sorry for the shrinks who wrote that as they seem to feel for me.