Forget Mental Health
I want you to forget about the term mental health for a moment.
Not because mental health doesn't matter.
Quite the opposite.
I wonder whether we have made the conversation too small.
When we hear the words mental health, many of us still think about anxiety, depression, crisis, diagnosis, therapy. Something starts going wrong, somebody begins struggling, and then psychology enters the room.
But psychology isn't something that begins when there's a problem.
It was in the room all along.
We don't act out of the blue
From the moment we are born, we are learning.
We learn how people respond when we cry.
We learn what gets attention.
We learn what makes somebody smile.
We learn what happens when we make a mistake.
We learn whether anger is frightening, whether sadness is welcome, whether asking for help works, whether disagreement is safe.
Later we learn how to hold a pencil.
How to greet somebody.
How to behave in a classroom.
How to make friends.
How to respond when somebody doesn't like us.
How to respond when we don't like ourselves.
Some of this learning is deliberate.
Much of it isn't.
We watch. We copy. We repeat. We are rewarded, discouraged, comforted, ignored, frightened, encouraged. Our brains and bodies continuously interact with the environment around us, and patterns begin to form.
We are conditioned beings.
We do not act out of the blue.
There is a history behind behaviour.
And yet we can spend years living inside these patterns without ever becoming particularly curious about how they got there.
You have been using psychology your entire life
You don't need to have a mental-health problem to have thoughts.
You don't need a diagnosis to experience fear.
You don't need to be in therapy to avoid things that make you uncomfortable.
You don't need depression to have an inner critic.
You don't need an anxiety disorder to worry about what other people think of you.
You don't need to reach crisis point before it becomes useful to understand why you react the way you do.
This is where I think our language sometimes gets in the way.
Psychology begins to sound like something that belongs to psychologists.
Therapy belongs to people who are struggling.
Mental health belongs to healthcare.
And everybody else gets on with life.
But everybody else is doing psychology too.
Every argument between partners.
Every child testing what happens when they say no.
Every person lying awake replaying a conversation from six hours ago.
Every time we avoid something because it frightened us once.
Every time we decide I'm just not that kind of person.
Every time somebody's facial expression changes and our brain immediately begins constructing a story about what it means.
Psychology is already happening.
The question is whether we understand any of it.
Imagine driving a machine you were never taught to operate
I once wrote in my notes that understanding the world within (e.g., what makes us tick, our mind and our body) matters because otherwise we are driving the machine blind.
I still like that image.
Imagine being handed an extraordinarily complicated machine.
It has memory.
It learns from experience.
It detects threats.
It forms habits.
It produces thoughts you didn't deliberately ask it to produce.
It reacts physically to things that haven't happened yet.
It can become frightened by its own sensations.
It can repeat something simply because repetition has made it familiar.
It can interpret one person's silence as peaceful and another person's silence as rejection.
And then somebody hands you the keys and says:
Off you go.
We teach people extraordinary amounts of information about the external world.
But how much do we teach them about the thing through which they will experience all of it?
Why wait until something goes wrong?
This is perhaps the part I struggle with most.
We often introduce psychological knowledge when somebody is already suffering.
Now the person needs to understand anxiety.
Now they need to learn about avoidance.
Now they need to understand thoughts.
Now we explain emotional regulation.
Now we talk about boundaries.
Now we talk about behaviour.
Now we explain that what the brain repeatedly does, it becomes increasingly good at doing.
Useful information.
But why now?
Why did we wait?
Why should somebody need to become unwell before learning how their own mind works?
Perhaps instead of asking only:
“Who has mental-health problems?”
we could also ask:
“How well do any of us understand how our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are formed?”
That is a very different question.
And importantly, it includes everybody.
Psychology is not therapy
I think this distinction matters.
Teaching somebody psychology doesn't mean turning everyday life into therapy.
Not every uncomfortable feeling needs analysing.
Not every child needs a formulation.
Not every difficult experience needs a diagnosis.
Sometimes you're having a terrible day because you're having a terrible day.
Psychological literacy isn't about constantly looking inside ourselves and searching for problems.
It is about having some understanding of the processes that are already happening.
Why does avoidance make something easier today but potentially harder tomorrow?
Why can two people experience the same event completely differently?
Why does my body react before I've had time to think?
Why do I keep repeating something I consciously know isn't helping me?
Why does criticism from one person barely touch me while one sentence from another can stay in my head for a week?
What happens to my thinking when I'm overwhelmed?
How do my expectations affect the way I enter a conversation?
How does my behaviour affect what happens next?
That's not therapy.
That's practical psychology for everyday life.
From awareness to choice
There is another reason I think this matters.
When we don't understand behaviour, we tend to moralise it.
Why am I like this?
Why is she so difficult?
Why doesn't he just stop?
Why can't I motivate myself?
Why does this child keep doing that?
Sometimes understanding the process underneath doesn't immediately change the behaviour.
But it changes the question.
Instead of:
What is wrong with you?
we can begin asking:
What happened here?
What did you learn?
What is maintaining this?
What does this behaviour do for you?
What happens immediately before it?
What happens afterwards?
Curiosity creates room where judgement tends to close it.
And once we can see a pattern, we have a better chance of deciding whether we want to keep repeating it.
That is where psychological knowledge becomes powerful.
Not because understanding ourselves gives us perfect control over ourselves.
It doesn't.
But awareness gives us something that automatic behaviour doesn't:
a little more choice.
Perhaps we need to think bigger than mental health
I am glad that we talk more openly about mental health than we once did.
I don't want that conversation to disappear.
I want it to grow.
Beyond illness.
Beyond diagnosis.
Beyond crisis.
Beyond the idea that psychology becomes relevant only when somebody can no longer cope.
Because understanding fear matters before fear becomes an anxiety disorder.
Understanding emotions matters before somebody learns to hate themselves for feeling them.
Understanding relationships matters before the same painful pattern has been repeated for twenty years.
Understanding behaviour matters before we decide that a struggling child is simply difficult.
Understanding ourselves matters before we become lost inside ourselves.
So perhaps when I say forget mental health, what I really mean is:
forget, for a moment, the boundary we have drawn around it.
Psychology is not only about what happens when the mind becomes unwell.
It is about how human beings learn, feel, connect, protect themselves, adapt, avoid, love, fear, repeat, change.
It is happening in hospitals and therapy rooms.
But it is also happening in classrooms.
At dinner tables.
In playgrounds.
In offices.
Between partners.
Between parents and children.
Inside the conversation you are having with yourself while reading this.
Psychology isn't something that begins when there's a problem.
There is an unexplored world inside an ordinary human being.
And what we find inside isn't necessarily pretty.
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About the author
Anita Toze is a Clinical Psychologist (HCPC registered in the UK) with a background in Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy. She works online and in person with adults and young people aged 11 and over.
Cover photo by Franco Debartolo on Unsplash