What is mental health and mental illness?
Back to Topic
Click to Print
Useful Websites
Glossary Term Selection
This article is 9 years old.
Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.
We often talk about mental health and mental illness. But what do we mean by mental health and emotional well-being and what can you do to look after your own mental health?
What do we mean by mental health?
There is often a lot of confusion about what we mean when we talk about mental health. Many people immediately start thinking about mental health problems or mental illness – but this is only one part of the picture...
Everyone has ‘mental health’ and this can be thought of in terms of:
- how we feel about ourselves and the people around us
- our ability to make and keep friends and relationships
- our ability to learn from others and to develop psychologically and emotionally.
Being mentally healthy is also about having the strength to overcome the difficulties and challenges we can all face at times in our lives – to have confidence and self-esteem, to be able to take decisions and to believe in ourselves.
Dealing with life’s ups and downs
Having said that we all have mental...
Want to see the rest of this article?
Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?
- Useful related articles
- Video and multimedia references
- Statistical information and reference material
- Glossary of terms
- Key Facts and figures
- Related assignments
- Resource material and websites
