What does mental health mean to you?

It seems easier these days to recognize mental illness than mental health. What is mental health? What does it look like for you? How will you know when you have it? What does it look like for society?

Mental health is not the same as “happiness”… or any singular emotional experience. Mental health speaks to resiliency, to a mind that is actively engaged in grappling with the issues facing the world and humanity today.

Mental health involves emotional understanding, sure, but it also involves intellectual growth and engagement as well as values that correspond to an evolving ethical system that balances personal and societal needs.

This is not how we tend to talk about mental health today. Rather, we are much more focused on emotional experiences and emotional pathology as the sole proxy for mental health. Emotional health is a component of mental health, but there’s just so much more to mental health that we also need to be talking about.