COLUMN: (De)mystifying Mental Health
This past April, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a statement highlighting reports on an increase of depression among Americans. According to the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey report, “the prevalence of depression in U.S. adolescents and adults increased 60% in the past decade.”
Furthermore, a perhaps even more troubling statistic from the report finds that a staggering 87.9% of individuals with depression “reported difficulty with work, home, or social activities because of their depression symptoms.” In short, not only is depression increasingly prevalent in the United States, but depression appears to greatly harm individuals as they try to keep up with their responsibilities and interests.
It is clear that the increased prevalence of depression has implications for the overall health of many individuals, and as such, demands our attention if we wish to be healthy in a holistic sense.
I find it necessary to emphasize the importance of mental health because of its relation to the overall health of one’s body. As an example, the National Institute of Mental Health, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, observed that individuals with depression are at increased risk of developing chronic diseases like heart disease or diabetes. Additionally, there exists present discourse surrounding concepts of psychosomatic disorders, a category describing physical — somatic — symptoms caused by mental stress. It is clear that the increased prevalence of depression has implications for the overall health of many individuals, and as such, demands our attention if we wish to be healthy in a holistic sense.
But how does mental health as a concept fit in with overall health? It turns out the answer is not as clear as one would initially think. In their 2023 study of different theoretical models for mental health, scholars Dirk Richter and Jeremy Dixon said that they were “unable to detect any approaches which might act as a basis for consensus within the academic field, amongst clinical professions, or between stakeholders.” In short, the definition of mental health is anything but clear-cut.
Another study, by researchers Jesse S. Y. Tse and Nick Haslam, found “the public’s concept of (mental health disorders) is not in lockstep with organized psychiatry,” highlighting definitional disputes present not only among clinicians, but between institutional views and those of laypeople. All this is to say that these disputes about the way we define mental illness — and its causality — create a vacuous space in which a pluralist approach to health can take shape.
For example, scholar Dennis Patrick Slattery examined the ways in which psychology can be viewed as a matter of poetics and mythmaking rather than only a scientific field. Slattery writes about “Re-visioning Psychology,” a book by American psychologist and scholar James Hillman. According to Slattery, Hillman aims “to realign the work of psychology — the logos of the soul — with the imagination.” This goal is also reflected in Richter and Dixon’s overview, as they write, “the domain of mental health problems is no longer viewed as exclusively psychiatric or psychological.”
I have chosen to present Slattery’s work because I feel that one can all too often reduce mental health to a purely scientific domain. Instead, I would like to explore how psychology can relate to creative endeavors that engage more with one’s imaginative abilities rather than one’s rationality and logic. Is mental health less about diagnostic discoveries and more concerned with the production of narrative? In other words, is taking care of one’s mental health like writing a novel?
I wish to explore the innumerable ways in which our psychic lives are affected by the activities we take part in, the beliefs we hold dear and the narratives we thereby create for ourselves.
On this last point specifically, I refer back to Slattery. He claims that “(mental) pathology is less organized around literal events, sicknesses, excesses, natural events, and more deeply around ‘mythical figures.’” In other words, our views of events in our lives are constituted more by our own imaginative description rather than the objective, observed actuality. Our lives become how we perceive them as opposed to matters of fact.
As bold an assertion as this may be, I think there exists something to gain in indulging this view and engaging with creativity when exploring subjects one may initially view as set in stone. More specifically, I wish to explore the innumerable ways in which our psychic lives are affected by the activities we take part in, the beliefs we hold dear and the narratives we thereby create for ourselves.
Like Slattery, I am positing a return to analogy as a method for self-description. By virtue of this expanded scope (as individuals can form an infinite amount of analogies, so the limit of the method is by definition inestimable), the mental life is adjacent to the political, social, spiritual and intellectual lives of an individual, blurring clearly observed boundaries between these categories.
Pushing further down this path, what does it mean to conceive of psychological care as a form of prayer and communion? As an investigatory mythmaking? Through writing, that delicate form of self-exposure? As an absence, a letting-go of the ideas and conditions with which one is constricted?
These are the questions I intend to explore in closer detail as to provide a greater sense of comfort alongside a healthy mind. My hope is for this ever-expanding amalgam of ideas to form a tapestry with which we can cover ourselves. It is not that one section of this quilt should take precedence over others; it is precisely because one combines these wonderfully varied components together that any of them can be individually effective.
