What is mental health? 29 September

Mental health in Australia

Next time you are in a big crowd of people, take a look around at the sea of faces and think about the statistics relating to mental ill health in Australia.

It’s estimated that 1 in 5 (20 percent) of Australians aged 16 to 85 have experienced a common mental disorder in the last 12 months. To say the least, this is a lot of people; it’s just shy of four million Australians based on 2017 population estimates.

It could be argued that most of us are touched by mental ill health at some point in our lives, whether it be our own personal experience or the experience of somebody close to us; a friend, a relative, a colleague. Read about new mental health research from the University of Sydney.

Without mental health there can be no true physical health.

What’s the definition of mental health?

There have been many incremental shifts in the public’s mental health awareness since 1954, when the World Health Organization (WHO) championed the idea that “without mental health there can be no true physical health”. However, the term “mental health” still often brings to mind conditions such as anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.

And you can see why, when anxiety disorders are estimated to impact 14.4 precent of Australians, followed by affective disorders such as depression which impact 6.2 percent of Aussies in a year.

However, WHO stresses that mental health is not simply an absence of a mental ill health but is “… a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”

To be able to do this, self-management is an important process.

What is self-management?

The idea of coping with stressors and feeling socially connected, highlighted by WHO, are important elements of managing mental health.

Some of my research at the Brain and Mind Centre looks at how self-management interventions can support people to manage their mental health, which can focus on physical, social and emotional parts of keeping well.

Self-management commonly includes:

• learning to anticipate and respond to signs of mental ill health (which can include using support networks in ways that help).
• developing skills to manage symptoms and other difficulties
• psycho-education
• a recovery-focused element, such as setting personal goals based on hopes for recovery
• it’s also important to know that self-management is more effective when it is done with the support other people. Some of my recent research in collaboration with UCL, which was published in the Lancet last year, found that when a self-management intervention was facilitated by a peer support worker (a person who uses their own lived experience of mental ill health purposefully in their job to support others) after someone was discharged from crisis care, it reduced readmission rates to crisis care and hospital significantly compared to self-management alone.

Dr Alyssa Milton is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow from the Brain and Mind Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health

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