What is mental health?
Your mental health refers to your emotional, psychological, and social
well-being. We all have mental health, just like we all have physical health.
Your mental health needs to be looked after, just like you look after your physical health.
Mental health is not a mental health condition.
What are mental health conditions?
A mental health condition is a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behaviour. Read more about different mental health conditions here.
It is diagnosed by a mental health care professional, like a clinical psychologist, clinical social worker, psychiatric nurse or psychiatrist. Mental health conditions include depression, bipolar, anxiety, and schizophrenia.
There is nothing shameful about having a mental health condition, just like there is nothing shameful about having high blood-pressure, diabetes or cancer.
How to take care of your mental health?
Thinking about Mental Health and Mental Health Conditions
The graphic above shows one way to view the relationship between mental health and mental health conditions.
The line that goes from top to bottom shows a person’s mental health. A person at the top would have ‘good mental health’, which is a state that allows us to live a meaningful life, reach our potential, cope with the stresses of life, and to function productively as part of our community. A person at the bottom would have ‘poor mental health’ which is a state in which there are continuing negative effects to their thoughts, feelings, or behaviours.
The line that goes from left to right shows if a person has a mental health condition or not. A person sitting on the far left would have a severe mental health condition and/or symptoms, while a person sitting closer to the middle on the left would have a mild mental health condition and/or symptoms. A person sitting on the far right would have no mental health condition, while a person sitting closer to the middle on the right might have some risk factors for a mental health condition, such as a previous mental health condition or a chronic medical condition like diabetes.
A person can move along both lines at different times. Throughout life, a person will have varying experiences of mental health or severity of conditions. There are many factors (biological, psychological, social and environmental) that affect where someone generally sits on the spectrum at any given point in time.
Importantly, this graphic shows that good mental health is not just the absence of a mental health condition, and that it is a fluid concept that might change over a person’s lifespan.
This content is adapted from the Orygen Global Youth Mental Health Advocacy Toolkit (2020)