Mental health is typically understood negatively, with a focus on what is not healthy

We need to advance more positive ideas about mental health as working models.

Erich Fromm's insights offer strong notions of well-being.

Our discourse is saturated with talk of mental health, often with resources to back this up. Mental health has assumed a (rightful) place at the top of the health pyramid, and we are better for it. A central irony in this “era of mental health,” however, is that we often lack a clear or consensus definition of it as a workable term and concept. Mindful of this gap, I offer some thoughts from mid-20th-century psychologist Erich Fromm as a potential guide toward a positive notion of mental health.

What Mental Health Is Not

In recent years, I designed a course called What Is Mental Health? and began by asking a simple question: “What does mental health look like?” This always produces a perplexed response and no easy answer. People usually know what poor mental health looks like—anxiety, depression, low mood, low motivation, panic attacks, paranoia, etc. This is easy. When faced with the opposite, however—good mental health—we usually need more than simply saying “no anxiety” or “no depression.”

A conversation about mental health thus evokes broader questions about well-being, wellness, and what a “good enough” life looks like. This yields different and competing answers. Is mental health about happiness? For some, yes. But what does happiness look like? Surely good mental health also involves accepting and acknowledging sadness, grief, and distress at times.

We often encounter this problem in interpersonal needs. Being anxious, jealous, or neurotic in a relationship is not ideal and likely needs work.........

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