Unpacking what it means to be mentally healthy

So as I find myself coming to, are you OK day for another year, I wanted to unpack some of the ideas that I shared during a presentation that I gave on the day as well as something I learnt from a really interesting session that was also run in flourishing. So the thing that often comes up for me, especially in the space where we're talking about say resilience is this idea of having to fit a very particular pattern of wellness and an expectation that everything sits on the individual to be well upon themselves. And this was something that I posed to the presenter of the previous session not to be a troublemaker but because I think it's a necessary component of understanding the full systems view of things and I was actually really pleased with the way that they addressed it in recognising that balance between good outcomes. We need to be in a position where we have agency to decide how we act and in making sure that the ways that we act are aligned to our values and what we want to achieve and that that's balanced with the responsibility that we have towards each other. That really matched my understanding.

The responsibility we all have towards addressing harms in a system which result in groups of people having to experience a greater level of harm and having to take on a greater level of of the responsibility of ‘fixing themselves’, when in fact there's a structural problem.

Where that understanding exists, I'm happy to hear the point around being aware of the emotions that are coming up being aware of what our buttons are, the things that will put us into an emotive state so that we get to have agency on how we respond to that emotion to that stimulus. Resilience is important but cannot exist in isolation.

Audre Lorde comes up here for me, and how self care has been repackaged into something without her original points on the importance of challenging that structures that continue to harm and oppress. A failure to do that just encourages individualisation of responsibility and performative happiness (also a point that came up from participants in my presentation today)

In my piece, what I spoke about was the way that we view someone on the basis of our expectations of what it means to be mentally healthy and in this there are all these assumptions that we carry with ourselves and that we perform normalcy, that we perform happiness, if someone ‘presents’ in a way that is unhappy that they are ‘unwell’ just because they do not perform in that way. The only way that we can really know whether someone is well or unwell (and I'm not talking about any diagnostic labels here; I'm talking about the subjective experience of self) The only way that you can know that is by asking the person

This requires a form of really deep listening and act of stopping ourselves. recognising that we are going to have these assumptions, that we do have our own internal biases and belief sets about what it means. When someone says this thing. We have to be willing to put this aside and when we want to help someone we have to engage in a practice that is essential in counselling and it's the idea of holding unconditional positive regard for another human being, which is actually hard to do! I will say this is not something that drops in your lap and suddenly that you can do it. it's one of those things where we call it a noun but really it's a verb so cultivating that positive regard for another person that desire for them to just have a good life to be well, and so when we go in with this mindset, the preordained outcome that ‘oh well this person's in a situation so there's something wrong with them’ is challenged. We go in and we listen to what it is that what if anything, is affecting this person and in what ways? Because the same matter may not affect one person because of their own context, what they've gone through, etc, etc. And for another person may be deeply affected or equally Some sort of some internal experiences may be comfortable for some and uncomfortable for others.

There's a difference that should be understood between having a diagnosable condition and someone's quality of life. You can have the person who has multiple medical conditions, they have this, they have that, they don't have all of these various things that maybe other people have, whatever it is. However, that does not guarantee that they will be unhappy. That does not guarantee that they will have a compromised quality of life. Quality of life is the key term here. It's subjective to the person and that's really what we need to get at.

To go to the work of Seligman (big name in wellbeing space) with PERMA, we really need to examine:

• the kinds of relationships that someone has and whether those are nurturing relationships
• whether someone feels that they can do the things in their life that they want to do
• whether they have a sense of achievement
• whether they get to experience positive emotion (which is not just to say they feel happy, but the broad range of positive emotions like humour and that sort of thing) and experiences like flow​

which necessarily do not directly map to the presence or absence of a medical condition. This is something that's really important to understand, especially if we want to operate in a space of helping others, but also if we want to operate in a space of helping ourselves. Which is where we look back at those assumptions, those presentations and ways we are expected to perform. Do we feel bad internally for not performing in that way? Is this a matter that directly affects our quality of life or is it an expectation that we are either putting on ourselves or have been placed upon us by society? And that's a really important one to think about.

Again, Audre Lorde, black feminist scholar, poet and activist, she coined that term self care but these modern adaptions of it are not sufficient. We situate it as this sort of individualistic, almost hedonistic Joy-seeking through sometimes superficial (and that's not to say that that people can't enjoy going for massage or anything like that) but it's incomplete and the incompleteness comes in in situating the entirety of our self-care in the individual of ourselves. Sometimes it can be healing and nurturing to us to look after, it can be nurturing to us to nurture. We can heal and support ourselves through looking after our community, community and environment, local space and bigger space. Caring for is also a form of self-care and when we examine the fullness of what it means to engage in self-care as not just seeking direct joy but also seeking to create better worlds, seeking to create environments that cultivate well-being in and of themselves. Then we are also creating space for a variety of ways of presenting. When we create a space that nurtures, we are also creating a space that allows us to feel, that allows us to act and behave, in ways that are intentional, rather than simply responsive to what we think we must do because it is expected of us.

So what I want to invite you all to consider is how our personal behaviour carries with it assumptions of others, carries with it expectations and presentations, and also how we can intentionally cultivate spaces that are nurturing, that do not require performance to enable understanding and consideration and caring for other humans.

How about you? What are some of the assumptions that you've noticed about what it means to present as mentally healthy or unhealthy? What are some ways that occur to you that can challenge those norms and create spaces where those who need help, can receive help and we do not also (through the act of expectation) create barriers that harm psychological health?

Here’s a slidepost version if a desirable alternative presentation

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