Got a problem with the meaning of mental health?
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Check out the number of times you heard in conversation, saw on social platforms and/or you used the words crazy, insane, syndrome, radicalized, mentally ill, narcissistic, stressed, burnt-out, polarized, role model, best version of myself, socialized, self-image, self-esteem, and on and on. Based on the ways that people in Western culture use psychological language to speak about people everywhere, it appears that we believe that almost everyone in the world except me has “mental health issues”.
I am going to use the OSCAR method: 1. observing my self-talk about what I am saying to myself and what other people are saying out loud about “mental health”; 2. sorting out my thinking about my assumptions, my expectations and what and who I am valuing regarding my self-talk about mental health; 3. connecting my vision of who and what are important to me when I am speaking about “mental health”; 4. acting on my new insights about the difference between mental health and mental well-being; 5. reviewing the results of my actions based on my new insights about mental health and mental well-being.
The observations made by all the resources of my common-sense tell me, as they tell all scientists, that I am one whole acting beingof many dimensions and combinations interacting with each other. The resources that make up my common-sense are: 1. The physical world given to me immediately in my perceptions: 2. The spiritual world of my own self-reflecting being of which I am immediately conscious in my self-speech; 3. The mental products of the culture given to me in the activity of language; and, 4. The self-evident principles of reason given to me in my critical rational self-speech about everything presented to me. As an acting being I am always in motion in the physical, mental, psycho-social and spiritual dimensions of my being. I am conscious of myself as a unifying, enduring, valuing, self-organizing, self-correcting, created and creating being of truth, goodness and beauty. In the simple activities of home carpentry and plumbing I need to know the truth about what things are and how they work, if I want a good and beautiful house. If I want a good and beautiful home, I need to know who I am and who my spouse and children are and how we function together.
We can understand ourselves and the physical things of our world. How do I know that the beliefs about the kind of being that I am, about the kind of being all human beings areand about what and who I value are true?
The evidence is self-evident to me. Humans speak to me all the time about creating forms of truth, goodness and beauty in their scientific theories, in their work, in family relations, and in the institutions of society. I see the results of their self-speech and the results of my own self-speech in what we produce. Everyone is trying to become what they intuitively feel about being human and what they rationally speak about to become fully human in their actions.I can see for myself the evidencein the heroic actions of human beings and in the simple actions of humans caring for each other in times of emergency that my beliefs are true.
I also see another truth. I am a limited being. I see and feel the gap between the way that I am and the way that I could be. I stand freely between the powers of my being that have been given to me and the possibilities of actualizing them for my own well-being and the well-being of all humans.
It is self-evident to me that there are humans that choose to become and do become the actors of truth, goodness and beauty in their own unique ways. It is also evident to me that there are humans that choose not to accept that they are limited. They choose and believe that there is no gap between who they are and what they are becoming. They believe that they themselves are the evolving truth, goodness and beauty who are changing the physical and social world into their likeness by their physical-social-psychic actions.
It appears to me that these two different beliefs get mixed into our speech and are used together without paying attention to what we are saying. For example, the public and the media commentors speak about the diminishing mental faculties of President Biden. Are they saying that he has mental health issues? If so, why do these same people judge him to be irresponsible for having issued executive orders that flouted the Supreme Court’s ruling on student loan forgiveness? Does President Biden know the condition of his mental faculties? If so, how does he know? If he does know, how is it possible for him to have only a “mental health” problem? Do his actions indicate other kinds of problems in other dimensions of his being? If he does not know his mental condition, how can he be blamed by the public for what he has done?
My initial observations lead me to believe that as a society we use precise language when we are speaking about things and about the functions related to our work. Bankers, carpenters, dentists, plumbers, and all of us at work think about what we are going to do and how and why we are going to do it. Carpenters know the qualities of wood and measure twice to cut once.
When we speak about human actions that disrupt the usual flow of our routines, we use either the labels of “mental health” to speak about all unlawful actions stretching from serious crimes to loitering or the language of etiquette such as the labels, inappropriate and unacceptable, to speak about human behaviors that are an offense to our social rituals rather than an offense to our sense of justice.
In the second stage of the OSCAR method common-sense recognizes the gaps and contradictions in our self-talk about “mental health”. Common-sense advises us to examine critically, that is, to measure what we are saying to ourselves and what other people are saying about “mental health” against the self-evident truths presented in our mind-body-spirit being in this universe. This activity of thinking about what we are saying to ourselves about our own existence in this universe is not difficult to do. We do this critical common-sense thinking about our thinking all the time at work, if we are interested in succeeding at what we are doing.
We all have standards in our work. We measure the quality of our performance against standards. The objective standard is made up of a precise knowledge about the structure and the operations of the things that we work with to produce clearly defined results. At work we take for granted the subjectively known critical common-sense standards of hard work, perseverance, effectiveness, efficiency, excellent results, achievement, profit and rewards that we value.
However, small and large corporations pressured by outside influences have written into their mission statements and strategic plans imposed practices that make up their corporate cultures. Some of the corporate values may not be attuned to what we value. Those in the corporation that deviate from the “corporate culture values” are referred to as problem people.
For example, the values of diversity, inclusion and equity have been written in to corporate mission statements and into many government procedures that regulate our institutions. The reason? To correct universal mental-social disorders such as white supremacy and many other social disorders. These disorders have been invented by whom? We can hypothesize that a loosely knit group of people that are committed to the fundamental transformation of our traditional society are the inventors of these specific labels of mental health social disorders.
We have a natural tendency to give a name to the object of our thinking. In our scientific-technological society we have a habit of speaking about human behaviors and naming them in the same way that we speak about the behaviors of things. We know that we can fix the behaviors of things. We unreflecting believe that we can also fix the broken behaviors of human beings.
First, we must label the disorder. Since human beings are living things, we use biological and medical labels to name the disorders under the umbrella name, mental health. Medical doctors must track down the cause of our pain-ridden bodies to fix them. Mental health practitioners that use the medical model believe that they can restore the mental health of our dysfunctional and pain-ridden psyche by naming and diagnosing our broken behaviors. They believe that they can track down the source of all out-of-order human behaviors in our body-psycho-social dimension that distinguishes us as human on the evolutionary scale.
My self-speech about who I am, what I am, and who and what I value, raises doubts about what I learned in the social sciences as opposed to what I learned in the natural science of physics. What kinds of activities am I doing when I am speaking to myself about what things are and about who I am and what and who I value? Am I going to find the answers to my questions in the activities of my body-psycho-social dimensions of my being?
Why is it that I ignore my self-speech about the kind of being that I am, when I am thinking about my “mental health”? Why is it that mental health practitioners reduce human actions to observable behaviors? When people talk about human agency, exactly what do they mean by being a human agent? Are the answers found in the body-psycho-social dimension of my being?
These questions and many more lead me to question the assumptions and the expectations of the undefined “they” that reduce all human actions to the category of “mental health”. If I assume that the only way to know human beings, of which I am one, is by means of the scientific method, then it makes sense to reduce all human actions to observable physical behaviors. Scientific statements about human behavior must be validated by observable measured evidence resulting from repeated control tests.
Therefore, according to this way of speaking, to know human beings means that I can only speak to myself and to other speakers and listeners about the images of human beings that are presented to me in sensation. Does this conclusion make sense?
Scientists speak to themselves and each other about the ways that can bypass the changing appearances of things given in sensation, because they want to speak about the objective structure of things and their operations that they intuitively know are behind the images of things. When I am speaking to myself about myself, are the objects of my self-reflecting speech and thought only about the images of myself given to me through my sensations? My critical common-sense tells me that statements about what and who I am based only on images of myself are not even scientific. Scientists intuitively draw on the mental immaterial resources of the mind such as mathematics to speak about the physical world.
Critical common-sense tells me that the scientific way of knowing humans is necessary because there is a physical dimension to our being. However, I need to know the interactions among the mind-body-psyche dimensions of my being.The source of the symptoms of my out-of-order behaviors could be a genetic disorder and/or an organ disorder such as the brain. The source might be a psychological cognitive disorder of overgeneralizing or not controlling my desires. Most symptoms of negative emotions according to Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist and a philosopher, can be traced to the confusion in our mind about who and what we are, about who and what we value and about the meaning of living. My critical common-sense tells me to know myself and other human beings scientifically, if I want to be physically healthy. But critical common-sense also tells me that scientific knowledge is far from being sufficient to know and understand the whole human being.
In the second stage of the OSCAR method I am thinking about my self-speech to discover the assumptions underlying the way that we use the label, mental health, in our everyday language to cover all the out-of-order behaviors of human beings. It appears that we assume that social scientists present us with a near perfect model of the structure and operations of a human being just as physicists present us with a near perfect model of the structure and operations of the atom. Is that assumption true? Let’s test it.
If a person is experiencing frustration, anger, depression and stress with a person or persons that they believe that they love, how will he or she solve the contradiction between the negative emotions that they are experiencing toward them and the love that they vigorously proclaim for them? If the person himself or herself believes that he or she has a mental health issue or is “in an unhealthy relationship”, how will he or she go about solving the problem? Most people will probably locate the cause of their painful emotions outside their own consciousness in the other person’s behaviors and/or dysfunctional organs or in a dysfunctional organ or operation of their own bodies. They feel helpless because they believe that the cause of their painful emotions is outside their conscious control.
The successes of cognitive behavior therapy, formerly known as rational-emotive therapy, demonstrate that irrational beliefs that violate the logical rules of thinking account for a large amount of our painful emotions. We intuitively know that our thinking will have physical consequences. Even bank robbers know that their anxiety will get in the way of a successful heist. Crooks can reduce their anxiety and improve their performance by developing the mental habit of ignoring their moral intuitions that are a source of anxiety.
The self-practice of cognitive behavior therapy is successful in restoring emotional balance. The theory is based on the ancient philosophical materialistic attitude that the purpose of life is to experience the pleasures of mind and body. However, it is insufficient for those that believe that the purpose of one’s existence is to live a full creative life. The person practicing cognitive behavior therapy needs to examine if the theory’s underlying materialistic attitude is completely rational. Our irrational beliefs about the kind of beings that we are and what and who we value can account for several physical and psychological disorders.
If we express out loud our self-talk about what we are saying to ourselves about our painful relationships and if we step back to question if our assumptions about what we believe and about the consequences that we expectare reasonable, we will spot our irrational beliefs. We begin to feel the truth of our rational self-speech that tells us that we are agents of truth that can correct our errors. We do not have a “mental health” problem. We have a mental habit problem of not engaging ourselves in self-reflecting speech to correct our irrational beliefs about whom and what we are and about who and what we value.
Critical common-sense tells us that we are one mind-body-psyche-spirit beings that is created and creating to become who and what we value. Critical common sense tells me to stay attuned to all the activities of all the dimensions of my being that are self-evident to me in my self-speech and are evident to me in speaking with self-reflective speaking human beings.
A symphonic orchestra is a useful metaphor to keep in mind in the next stage of the OSCAR method. Although the members of the orchestra are individuals with their feelings for and their understandings of music, they listen to each other, they read from the same composition, and they heed the conductor’s directions to produce the musical beauty of the one whole performing orchestra.
In the third stage of the OSCAR method we want to creatively discover and connect practical ideas that are attuned to the vision of the human being as one mind-body-psyche-spirit being agent of truth, beauty and goodness. Like the symphonic orchestra that functions in unison, the human being has many dimensions each with its own structure and functions that work together according to unifying principles that are understood by people that develop the habit of self-reflecting speech.
Unlike the symphonic orchestra human beings are the directors and the authors of the composition created from the resources given to us. Our vision of becoming the complete person of the person that we are moves the activities of all our dimensions to create habits of thinking and behaving that will actualize our vision.
The last two steps of the OSCAR method are to put into action our mental and behavioral habits that we tailor to the specific situations of our lives. Then we use our critical common sense to review the results of our actions.
Although we use the word health that applies directly to states of living bodies, we use it in metaphorical ways to speak about the states of wholeness and of effective functioning of the objects of our speech such as a healthy economy. If we use them metaphorically to speak about the mental activities of human beings, the implied erroneous assumption is that “mental health” originates in the activities of our brain and that behavioral disorders, such as drug addiction, is a disease. To assume that the energy of the activities of our human consciousness that account for our being human comes from a force outside our control does not make sense to the activities of my critical common-sense self-speech.
We are in the habit of speaking about ourselves in the language of the evolutionary social scientists that believe that the activities of the mind emerge from the evolving energy of matter. My critical common-sense beliefs about what and who humans value such as free speech tell me that I believe that I know my belief that humans are body-mind-psyche-spirit beings is true. My critical common-sense also tells me that the hypothesis of biological evolution makes sense. My critical common-sense self-speech tells me that biological evolution accounts for my self-speech makes no sense. My critical common-sense also tells me that American citizens have mental habit problems about understanding the kind of being that humans are and about understanding who and what they value. We are flooded with the popular languages of the social sciences and the natural sciences that most of us do not understand.
The OSCAR method of self-reflecting speech of thinking about our thinking about what we are experiencing is a traditional way of developing mental habits to understand the truths and limits of the language of the evolutionary social scientists. It is a way of entering into dialogue with my own being and with those that share my beliefs and with those that do not share my beliefs about who we are.
My critical common-sense advises me to heed the call of the intuition of all the dimensions of my being and to practice the mental habit of speaking about the state of the well being of my mental activities that are striving to know truth and do good.
| To learn more about the VisionCircles methodology and the OSCAR method click here or visit our Bookstore. |