Reply to comment

In class I wasn't able to express this succinctly, but I think both that:

A) There is no tea-kettle health, or even a tea-kettle system of healthful activities. 

and

B)  I agree that health is a journey (as nobody can ever reach the pinacle of even their own personal health capabilities, if such a thing could exist). 

In the second sense, B, I think we are in agreement in terms of health both physical and mental. It is from this end that I suggested, earlier in the semester, that everyone could benefit from therapy (theoretically, always). I mean this not in a practical sense, as I do see this as being cost prohibitive, and perhaps not the best use of state dollars (see NICE in Britain), but in the perfect sense: I think we are all, always, in a place that could be better, that we could always grow psychologically. 

It seems to me that we have come to a place where the goal of mental health is to continue working towards a self-actualizing life. What a "self-actualized" person looks like is immaterial but a trip towards psychological health would be one towards expressing one's own individual capacities in the fullest possible way. In thinking of health this way, we are allowing for the treatment of people who do not believe they need treatment, and for people who ask for things in treatment we can't/won't provide them with. In this sense, the truest roadblock to actualization is a refusal to explore things that hold one back. That whole unexamined life thing ...

I think that equally true in this process is accepting one's limitations, whether due to birth, history, and/or circumstances/luck, and forging on. To the person who asks us to make them a cheerleader/queen of England/America's Next Top Model we say that the job of a doctor/mental health professional isn't to make a person any one thing, but to help them get wherever they are going. A therapist/mental health professional can never get a person anything, whether we believe it important or not. (Even if a lonely kid asks for friends, not cheerleading ability and popularity, even the best mental health practitioner can't make them appear out of thin air ...)

I think this is one of those things that works better when you consider it in a personal way than in a broad sense, and I think, to a degree, being a good mental health practictioner means just that: thinking about each person in his or her own way, and treating each as such. It is also about increasing a person's own ability to make choices: the problem with agoraphobia, for example, isn't that a person is functioning outside of society, but that he or she feels unable to do otherwise. The problem with mania isn't mania, but rather that it prevents a person from expressing themselves as fully as they can/may potentially limit his or her agency. A goal for treatment isn't about the "problem" but about the "person", not as separate from such. Not, how do I cure mania, but how do I work to help this person lead a life as full as possible, within their natural born gifts and constraints.