2.4 Mental wellbeing or mental health: what’s the difference?

Let’s address a common question: what’s the difference between mental wellbeing and mental health?

This course tends to refer to ‘wellbeing’ rather than ‘health’, and different interpretations of the meaning of ‘wellbeing’ (mental and physical) have already been presented. It’s worth noting, however, that the terms ‘mental wellbeing’ and ‘mental health’ often get used interchangeably, and some of the resources included in this course will therefore refer to ‘health’ rather than ‘wellbeing’. The UK Department of Health explains the relationship between mental wellbeing and mental health as follows:

The terms ‘mental illness’ and ‘mental disorder’ are used to describe specific, diagnosable health conditions that involve emotional, thinking or behavioural changes – or a combination of these. They tend to have persistent behavioural signs and symptoms, just as health conditions such as diabetes or heart disease have measurable physical symptoms.

Slightly confusingly, the World Health Organization actually includes the word ‘wellbeing’ in its definition of mental health:

Student Minds, the UK’s student mental health charity, states that ‘mental health is based on a continuum and can fluctuate at different times’ (StudentMindsOrg, 2018). They have a useful graphic to illustrate this:

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Figure 4 Mental health as a continuum.

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This diagram shows a four-quadrant graph. The x-axis runs from ‘Mental health difficulties’ on the left to ‘Minimal mental health difficulties’ on the right. The y-axis runs from ‘Minimal mental wellbeing’ at the bottom to ‘Optimal mental wellbeing’ at the top. The axes meet in the middle, producing four quadrants, each one containing some text. The top-left quadrant reads ‘A person experiencing significant mental health difficulties, can manage these well and have good support in place, allowing optimal mental wellbeing’. The top-right quadrant reads ‘People who are not experiencing mental health difficulties still benefit from looking after their mental wellbeing’. The bottom-left quadrant reads ‘Challenging managing mental health difficulties, and a lack of support can lead to minimal mental wellbeing’. The bottom-right quadrant reads ‘The challenges of university life can lead us to have minimal mental wellbeing, in the absence of mental health difficulties’.

Figure 4 Mental health as a continuum.

In summary, there’s no straightforward distinction between the two terms, but there’s no doubt that a person’s mental wellbeing can have a considerable effect on their mental health. Looking after your mental wellbeing, and having resources and strategies in place to support you during challenging or stressful situations, can help you avoid developing more serious mental health problems. This course will introduce some of these resources and strategies, but it will not cover mental illness in detail. If you are interested in learning more about this subject, OpenLearn has numerous free courses, which you can find by visiting the Free courses [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] page and typing ‘mental health’ in the search bar.

See also: Wellbeing and mental health collection.