The term mental health is thrown around a lot -- this has especially been true during the few decades previous -- but mental health's complete meaning is often misunderstood. Casual discussion of mental health typically focuses on substantial mental disorders: schizophrenia illness, bipolar disease, sociopathic behavior, Alzheimer's, and other conditions. But what's excluded in conversations like this is the reality that mental health factors into everyone's life: all of us.

Thinking on mental health typically focuses on disorder. Someone who has a condition is psychologically unwell; being free of a condition makes one mentally well. This reasoning is problematic in different ways. Firstly, there are many people who do, in fact, have mental health disease go without being diagnosed. The world is full of people with undiagnosed mental conditions.

Secondly, optimal mental health isn't only the absence of a mental condition, or the presentation of symptoms. Mental health isn't solely about not having: it's just as equally about having.

Optimal mental health means being successfully able to cope with life setbacks; having productive and healthy interactions with family members and friends; having, at the very least, functional relationships with co-workers and other informal acquaintances; and being able to successfully acclimate to society. These are elements that can certainly be lacking in someone without any sort of identifiable mental or emotional illness.

In the event that one does lack these coping and social interaction capabilities, would they be considered mentally ill? Very unlikely under current definitions. But perhaps current definitions should be changed. An argument could be made that the lack of coping or interaction skills does, in fact, indicate mental illness, particularly when acting out, or the use of drugs or alcohol, is a response to poor coping. Habitually angry or addicted people don't typically fall under the label of mentally ill. Were this to change, large numbers of people might be encouraged to get some form of mental health care.

Taking this approach -- defining typical dysfunction as indications of mental or psychological illness, and subsequently encouraging treatment for such -- would surely come up against opposition. Arguments in opposition might include the thinking that labeling and treating basic dysfunctions would be a case of overkill, would intrude on people's lives, and would be tantamount to medicating scores of people. But does this really constitute a legitimate counter argument? There's no absolute law that requires mental health to be an intrusive experience, or some type of pharmaceutical experience. No one is suggesting that pharmaceuticals be passed about in even greater quantity than they are now.

Mental health treatment, at its core, should emphasize the teaching of coping techniques. This is different than changing a person's reality. Let the reality remain the same: just change the dysfunctional strategies and methods people use to cope. This approach needn't involve using pharmaceutical treatment at all. Mental health treatment has a long history, and during much of that history pharmaceuticals weren't even available. People don't need to use pharmaceuticals to treat basic emotional and psychological functioning. Let's get that truth out in the open, where it belongs.