Psychologists Defined the 6 Elements of Mental Health. How Many Do You Have?Forget TikTok trends or Instagram advice, a new study asked dozens of actual experts what is actually important for good mental health.

Trauma, anxiety, autism, ADHD, neurodivergent. Put just about any word related to mental health into a Google Trends search and you’ll see the same pattern: a relatively flat line up until about 2020 and then a steep climb thereafter.

It’s a bit of objective confirmation for a trend many people already noticed. The internet in general, and social media in particular, is increasingly overrun with talk of mental health. A quick spin around TikTok is enough to convince most people that Interest in psychological well-being has clearly never been higher. (Though if you want scientific confirmation, studies exist.)

Which makes one central fact about mental health all the more startling. Experts in the field had never even agreed on what good mental health looks like. At least until a new study took a stab at nailing down the key ingredients of psychological health.

Mental health is hard to pin down

We all know intuitively what it means to be physically healthy. You’re free of disease and pain and your body works as it should. Your heart pumps, your spleen spleens, and your muscles do whatever you ask them to do. But what does mental health look like?

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Sigmund Freud hinted at the problem when he claimed the goal of therapy is to turn “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” Suffering is part of life and people are wildly different. Where the line sits between normal variation and a problem worthy of concern is far from clear. Concepts like happiness are notoriously hard to pin down.

This complete lack of a well defined target has been a bit of an embarrassment for mental health professionals. So a group of 122 of them recently decided to do something about it.

How to get 122 academics to agree
The group included a variety of mental health experts, from psychologists and psychiatrists to public health researchers and even philosophers, from 26 mostly western countries. They came together with one goal: to use an established technique for finding consensus called the Delphi method to settle an important question once and for all. What are the essential ingredients for good mental health .. Source