People are mentally healthy if they enjoy being with the people they know, especially family, sexual partners and friends, happy people generally are willing to help friends, colleagues and family feel better. They are comparatively stress free, laugh a lot and rarely suffer from aches and pains. They usually have no trouble in accepting that people do think and behave differently from them. these people rarely criticize others, or try to change others. If they are affronted with difference of opinions, they will put their point of view and are okay with the other’s point of view. They enjoy their work. When they are unhappy, they are aware that it is part of life, and try to do something about it.
Somewhere along the line less and less people seem to be in this state of mind. There is a huge PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH challenge. Unfortunately we tend to address it through labels, created through the medical grid which requires an identifiable pathology. The recourse of medication is used. Unfortunately, therapeutic counselling also follows the medical labelling and grid.
People with unexplained body aches, or anxiety issues are not mentally sick, they are only not mentally as healthy as they would like to be. The resolution for this is not medication, or cognitive therapy, but to educate the individual on how they function. To put it in contemporary linguistics, it is about how they are wired to function.
Another set of people, with psychological symptoms like, depression, anxiety, mania, phobia, psychosis, obsessions, compulsions and chronic pain with no apparent physical cause are diagnosed a mental disorder and are put on medications. Again, these are not symptoms of mental ill health but of weakened mental health.
First there is a THE PUBLIC HEALTH MODEL despite of many public health models what is most important is that the physician is not in charge here. The physician of course points out the needs for clean water, or immunization, but the actual procedures are done by medical technicians, all that the public has to do is to drink the clean water or show up for the immunization.
Medications often act as placebo’s I have come across individuals who feel less anxious since they know that if they do have an attack there is remedy at hand.
EDUCATION IS THE CORE OF MENTAL HEALTH MODEL:
As majority of the mental health issues stem from unhappiness. This could stem from any source like relationships. People do not seem to get along with the most important people in their life. It is interesting that we do not add this into our curriculum. As most of these arise from external control.
The basic goal of AATMAYANA is to create and empower you to replace the external control with CHOICE the awareness that they have choice. there are basic needs encoded in us, that is SURVIVAL,FREEDOM OR AUTONOMY, &FUN. The 4th need is to be LOVED, we assume to be loved is by another, but if we can accept ourselves then we automatically become more loveable, like if we are willing to accept the autonomy of others, it sets us free.
Then comes the 5th need the need for POWER, no other creature has this. This is unique to the human race. This need for power came along with the onset of civilization, and moving in herds. The externalization of controls psychology emerged.
Of course, it is this very need for power that gave rise to science, art, even political system. What is POWER is genetically encoded but the external control is not. It emerges from the way we are brought up, the social environment, the educational, and economic background, the religious moral code all this contribute to create the belief system in us
Doing away with external control releases us from criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, bribing, and rewarding to control. These need to be REPLACED by supporting, encouraging, listening, accepting, trusting respecting and negotiating differences.
Even as the individuals talk to the psychiatrists or the therapists it is still in the medical model. What we need really recreate in the model of PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH and return the autonomy to the individual where they realize that they have a choice and consequences of the choice good bad or ugly is theirs.
ANAHITA 