What are the aspects of mental health?

The current consensus in the field of clinical psychology and mass psychological services is that mental health is never a single criterion of "no mental disorder", but a comprehensive state covering five interrelated dimensions of self-cognition, emotional regulation, behavioral patterns, social adaptation, and sense of value. Long-term disorders in any one dimension, even if it does not reach the diagnosis line of the disease, belong to the category of mental health that needs adjustment.

In the past two months, I received a visitor who was a junior in college. He was ranked in the top 5 in his major, had a harmonious family relationship, and had not suffered any major trauma. He spent an hour or two every day for six months in a row reviewing "Is the sentence he just said to his classmate inappropriate?" Even if the other person had long forgotten the relevant conversation, he would blame himself over and over again, and even got to the point where he did not dare to take the initiative to talk to others. Do you think he has any serious mental illness? In fact, he has not yet reached the diagnostic criteria for social anxiety disorder, but this is an obvious gap in self-awareness and emotional regulation, and it has truly affected his normal life.

Speaking of this, some people may wonder, then I usually emo occasionally and get angry for several days after quarreling with others. Is this considered mentally unhealthy? Of course not. Mental health itself is inherently elastic. Just like the sports shoes we often wear, they will naturally bend when walking. As long as the pressure disappears and they can rebound to their original shape, there is no problem at all. Only if they are wrinkled and unable to rebound for a long time, there is a real problem.

However, regarding the specific category of mental health, there is currently no completely unified evaluation standard in the academic community, and it is an area of ​​certain controversy: in the early years, Western evaluation systems regarded "actively expressing negative emotions outwards" as the core indicator of emotional health, and even people who were accustomed to toleration by default had psychological disorders. However, in the context of East Asian collective culture, many people prefer to deal with conflicts through self-digestion and empathy. As long as the individual does not feel aggrieved and internally consumed, it is not considered unhealthy at all. In recent years, the domestic psychological assessment system has also been slowly adjusting, no longer rigidly applying Western standards, and focusing more on individual subjective feelings rather than unified behavioral templates.

When I go to the community to do charity science popularization, I always tell everyone that there is really no need to use the online comparison table to check whether you have "qualified" one by one. The simplest judgment criteria are actually two points: are you comfortable in your daily life, and has your condition affected your normal eating, sleeping, studying, working, and socializing? If there is no problem with these two points, even if you occasionally have small emotions and entanglements, it is a normal state, and there is no need to worry about "absolute health".