What Is Mental Health?

Psychologists and psychiatrists pay so much attention to mental disease that they may not know a healthy mind when they see one. Even the definitions of mental health are vague and still the subject of argument. Last week members of the American Psychological Association were pondering a positive definition of emotional health, advanced by the University of California's Dr. Frank Barren. The definition was unusual because it sounded so usual. The factors listed by Psychologist Barren as indicating good mental health might have been cited by any old-fashioned moral philosopher:

P: Character and integrity.

P: Intelligence. (Barron and colleagues found that neurotic patients at a psychiatric clinic had chances of successful treatment in proportion to their intelligence.)

P: Ability to set a goal, keep it in sight, work toward it persistently and efficiently.

P: Good judgment in appraising reality, likability and self-knowledge.

"For the most part it is probably a healthy thing to be rather well-behaved," added Psychologist Barron. "But there are times when it is a mark of greater health to be unruly . . . The ability to permit oneself to become disorganized is crucial to the development of a very high level of integration . . .

"The moment of health is the moment of unconscious creative synthesis, when, without thinking about it at all, we know that we make sense to ourselves and to others . . . When such simplicity amid complexity has been achieved, I think that two new and important [feelings] come into the individual's experience: 1) the feeling that one is free and that life and its outcome are in one's own hands; 2) . . .a deeper sense of relaxed participation in the present moment . . . Life ceases to be a course between birth and death, and becomes instead a fully realized experience of change . . ."

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