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I completely agree with Paige. I also believe that it is impossible to come up with a universal definition of mental health. People differ from one another in their intelligence, desires, feelings and behaviors, in their views of themselves and the others, and in their views of the world and the future. We cannot just categorize the differences among people without considering how the different parts of each person come together to make that person who she/he is.

Modern research seeks the reason for every personality and every possible pathological evolution of our being in relation to the others. The individual must be conceived as inserted in a network of interpersonal relations in order to define psychological phenomena. Personal experiences, even in the early infancy, are frequently considered when particular pathological conditions are manifested, in order to justify the modalities of action of an individual.Thus, we should move forward from a simple description of the symptoms and the idea of a single isolated subject.

At the beginning of this course, my definition of mental health was based on the distinction between what can be considered normal and abnormal. The label“abnormal psychology” suggests that we should start with a conception of normalcy and then define mental illness as variations that are not normal.However, something can be an illness even if it is a normal occurrence, and things could be abnormal without being illness. 

We all have different experiences and we all respond to external stimuli in different ways.