What Makes You Mentally Healthy?

What Are the Ingredients of Positive Mental Health?

If you were to think about what the ingredients of positive mental health are, what would come to mind? I personally would start by pondering whether positive mental health is synonymous with psychological well-being. But if I really HAD to give an answer without any prior clarification, I would probably treat them as synonyms, and say that according to my knowledge, one needs to experience one's life as meaningful, broadly understood as having a purpose leading to a sense of significance and that we are making a difference, alongside happiness, stable mood, and life satisfaction.

A paper that came out a few days ago, that I discovered thanks to a post by Todd Kashdan (who is among the authors) has done a brilliant thing: using a methodology called Delphi to gauge the convictions of a broad range of experts working on this topic (122 from various fields), and see if consensus can be reached amid all the disagreement (and there is plenty!!): 🔗 Link to the article

We find many different existing approaches within the field of well-being: "eudaimonic well-being", "subjective well-being", "flourishing", "existential well-being", all filled with many MANY different measures and dimensions. This is a double-edged sword that constitutes both the richness and vitality of this field, but also its greatest weakness, as it is hard to navigate for experts, and even more so for non-experts who need the support of science for their endeavors: public policy, counsellors, management, and so on.

And here comes the most interesting part of this article: instead of focusing on disagreements, what are the key ingredients experts in the field would actually agree on? Through their methodology, the authors narrowed down this list to nine dimensions (each exceeding 90% agreement), including "meaning and purpose", "life satisfaction", "self-acceptance", "connection", "autonomy", and "happiness"! Happy to see I was not too far from this consensus!

I was feeling reluctant to include connection and autonomy, alongside competence (the experience of effectiveness and mastery), as I consider them basic psychological needs, and therefore predictors rather than core components of positive mental health. So now I have new food for thought.

Whenever such great work comes out, I am always thrilled, as it means the science of well-being is moving in the right direction toward greater consensus and clarity, pushing back against its internal confusion and the overproliferation of conceptualisations and measurement tools!

— Joffrey Fuhrer