Health
Throughout psychological history, a dominant position has maintained that the psychologically healthy person is one who maintains close contact with reality. ~ Shelley Taylor & Jonathon Brown
Though mental illness has long raised controversy in diagnoses and causes, there has been a remarkable consensus throughout history about mental health.
Psychological health is characterized by responsive awareness of what is going on as contrasted to interpretation reflecting perceived past patterns. Healthy behavior indicates spontaneous acceptance of actuality, regardless of how unappealing it may be.
The perception of reality is called mentally healthy when what the individual sees corresponds to what is actually there. ~ Austrian British social psychologist Marie Johoda
Visceral reactions illustrate mental health. However common, negative outbursts are never an exhibition of mental health. Being overcome with fear, anger, or hate signify mental illness. Healthy individuals are well-tempered emotionally.
◊ ◊ ◊
Overly positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or master, and unrealistic optimism are characteristic of normal human thought. These illusions appear to promote other criteria of mental health, including the ability to care about others, the ability to be happy or contented, and the ability to engage in productive and creative work. These strategies may succeed, in large part, because both the social world and cognitive-processing mechanisms impose filters on incoming information that distort it in a positive direction. ~ Shelley Taylor & Jonathon Brown
The mental health of those in the Collective is relative. An ongoing quest for happiness, facilitated through fictions, indicates subdued angst – in other words, a façade of mental health.
The absence of mental illness is not a sufficient indicator of mental health. ~ Marie Johada
Abiding mental health occurs only when one is not a slave to one’s own mind. “Exaggerated perceptions” are not mental health, even if they “distort in a positive direction.”
The mind’s proclivity is to obscure clarity for positivity where possible, and to believe that actuality is reality. The naïve realism that the Collective subscribe to under the banner of matterism is ignorant nonsense, not mental health.
Matter and mind are not separate. They are aspects of one energy. What you think to be the world is your own mind. The real is experienced in silence. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj
Psychically embracing economic materialism is also detrimental to mental health. A focus on materiality may inadvertently trade away love.
Can’t buy me love. ~ English musician Paul McCartney in the song of the same name (1964)
Materialism is not an isolated life priority; as the pursuit of money and possessions are prioritized, other dimensions of life, such as relationships, are de-emphasized. ~ American sociologist Jason Carroll
