Mental Health: Mind and Body

Mental health is another name for person-al happiness insofar as this illusory and dif­ficult goal can be attained A mentally healthy person is generally comfortable with himself and behaves acceptably in the eyes of his fellow men. The phrase "mental health" and its adjunct "mental hygiene" are com­paratively new to the English language, but the topic they cover has been the concern of poets, preachers, and philosophers in all ages and languages.

Many verbal definitions of "mental health" have been attempted. When they go beyond the portrait of the "happy man," they end in a tangle of words. As simple and sensible a con­cept as any is that proposed by Frud, namely: a person is mentally healthy to the extent that he can love and work Conversely, he is mentally ill to the degree that he cannot love or work. This concept leaves a wide range for normal behavior It also suggests that, just as perfect happiness comes to no one, even so no one is ever in perfect mental health all the time Imperfection is the distinctive badge of the human race, and we are wise when we acknowledge this about ourselves.

We must not think of mental health as a sheer abstraction. It has a locale in the body and mind of each separate individual. You included. But problems, still unresolved, arise if we attempt to assign exact bodily lo­cations to the multitudinous functions of the mind and emotions. The best we can say is that these functions occur in or are mediated by the human nervous systems, sometimes assisted by the endocrine system. We shall seek later in this chapter to provide a brief description of the human nervous systems and, beyond that, to offer some explanation of the physiology of thought and feeling.

Mental health is a 24-hour a day posses­sion. It is present during sleep as well as waking. Indeed one of the positive indications of lack of mental health is constantly dis­turbed sleep sleeplessness or insomnia. In the mentally healthy man or woman there is a regular cycle of sleep and wakefulness. Throughout all of this the unconscious mind remains in operation- Since sleep and rest are critical factors in mental health, we shall also deal with these subjects later in this chapter.