1.1 ‘Mental health’ and ‘wellbeing’
The terms ‘mental health’ and ‘wellbeing’ are often used interchangeably. In reality, both these terms have different meanings but also overlap – with wellbeing often thought of as a wider-ranging term, of which mental health is one element. While there is no single definition of mental health used by all organisations, most definitions are variations on the same theme. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines mental health as:
… a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community.
You might notice that this specifically refers not just to how someone is feeling, but also how their mental state may affect their education, work or interaction with other people in their community.
Activity 1 Defining mental health and wellbeing
Do a quick internet search for mental health definitions in the country you live in. You might want to limit this to different adult education settings, such as universities, colleges and community education organisations. While you do this, think about the following issues:
- Does your country, or language, have a variety of terms which define mental health or wellbeing?
- What are the similarities in the definitions; for example, do they focus on the same or different things, and why?
- Do these definitions make distinctions between mental health, wellbeing and mental illness?
- Are these definitions heavily influenced by who they are written by, or for, and could they be applied in different contexts?
- Now, try to come up with your own definition of ‘mental health’ and write it down. This is not something you need to share but gives you the opportunity to explore your own understanding.
Note your response in the box below. Your answer will only be visible to yourself.
Discussion
Your exploration should have identified different definitions of mental health terminology and given you the chance to think about how these may influence your own understanding. The impact of this on your practice as an educator, and on learners, will be explored in more detail as this course progresses. Keep your own definition to hand as you work through this course and see if it changes as you progress through your learning. You will be invited to return to it at the end of Week 4 to reassess.
As educators, a key thing to remember is that everyone has ‘mental health’, and anyone’s mental state can change over the course of a day. Mental ill-health is not something that you can ‘catch’ and, as humans, we are all situated somewhere on a continuum from healthy to unhealthy, both physically and mentally, at any given time (Antonovsky, 1984). However, mental health is something we can grow in awareness of and work on to improve. The next activity will help you think more about what this might mean in educational practice.
Activity 2 Exploring ‘optimal’ and ‘poor’ mental health
- Draw a vertical line on a page, with ‘optimal mental health’ at the top and ‘poor mental health’ at the bottom.
- Take two minutes and think of anything you feel might indicate if a learner is experiencing ‘optimal’ or ‘poor’ mental health and put them on your line. If you can, try to avoid just putting two lists at either end of the line and instead, see if you can spread them over the line, according to how strongly you feel each one indicates if someone is towards one end or the other.
Comment
This activity demonstrates what is meant by a ‘continuum of mental health’. On your line you may have written a range of different emotions or behaviours, that could be apparent to other learners and educators or not, and some of these may have been very personal to you. You may have noticed that there will be different emotions or behaviours at different points of your line, and you may even have thought these might be different for different people.
We can all experience feelings at different points on the line over the course of a day, often in response to ‘normal’ interactions with people and the environment around us. These fluctuations are common for us all, and in many ways are an indicator of good mental health themselves. If, however, a learner is experiencing lots of the feelings and emotions at the bottom of the line in the diagram, or spends sustained time in those experiences, this may indicate that they need further support or may be likely to experience poor mental health.
What you can acknowledge is this: moving up and down this continuum is what is meant by ‘mental health’ in practice – and so this can include mental ill-health in some contexts and times too.