Mental health

🔆 ‘Mental health should be viewed not as a homogeneous construct, but as one with a complex, multi-level structure.

The highest level of mental health is the personal–meaning level, or the level of personal health, which is determined by the quality of a person’s meaning-laden relationships.

The next level is the level of individual-psychological health, whose assessment depends on a person’s ability to find adequate ways of realizing meaningful aspirations, to build a system and hierarchy of concrete goals, to achieve successful outcomes in activity, and so on.

Finally, there is the level of psychophysiological health, which is determined by the characteristics of the internal, cerebral, neurophysiological organization of acts of mental activity and is meant to ensure the breadth, stability, and constancy of the conditions under which mental processes unfold.

It is not difficult to assume that each of these levels, having its own criteria and parameters, must also have its own specific regularities of realization. From this, in turn, follows another hypothesis: despite the interconnection and interdependence of the levels, the most diverse variants of their development, and of the degree and quality of their health, are possible. In other words, mental health, being multi-level, may be impaired at some levels while remaining relatively preserved at others.’

B. S. Bratus, Anomalies of Personality: A Psychological Approach