What is good mental health?

Apologies for the lack of blog for a few weeks. A family bereavement followed by a couple of weeks with a full diary playing catch up and my blog got neglected.

A theme that comes up time and again in my work is young people’s mental health in Surrey and it seems particularly appropriate to think about this now. I have had discussions with various people and no one has come up with a definition of what good mental health looks like. We have an idea of measures about good physical health – body mass index, heart rates, cholesterol – and what we need to do to achieve this – exercise, 5 a day, etc.

In other areas of public activities there is a clear focus on the positive – a sense of safety rather than a fear of crime. We have the much more proactively named “Supporting Families” work rather than the “Troubled Families” programme.

So, with respect to mental health, I believe it is important to know what we are aiming for. What does good mental health look like? And what can we do to get there?

So far, I have not managed to find an official definition of what good mental health is. Can anyone provide me with one?

In the meantime, we do have some excellent feedback from the CAMHS Rights and Participation team who asked young people what they thought it meant to be emotionally healthy.

After a discussion here is a list of what they believed could define good emotional health:
- Good independent coping mechanisms
- Balanced range of emotions
- Being able to stay positive even when times are tough.
- Having the ability to learn from experiences and move forward positively.
- Having a “Thirst for life”  (Looking forward to the future positively).
- Accepting there are bad days as well as good days.
- Healthy understanding of your own thoughts, feelings and emotions.
- Knowing your possibilities and being realistic.
- Being able to make goals, and having hopes and dreams.
- Feeling motivated.
- Not being hard on yourself.
- Being able to feel comfortable in "your own shell"

A young person also wrote a piece of text to describe what good emotional well being looks like:

Good emotional health is having good independent coping mechanisms to be able to successfully deal with any situation that might arise in daily life. Good emotional health is to have a balanced range of emotions, and to be able to express them all healthily, whilst also learning from all experiences and move forward from them positively. Good emotional health is staying positive even when times are tough, and being aware that everyone has bad days from time to time.

Please do let me know if you have seen an official definition of what good mental health looks like.