Promotion

28 MENTAL HEALTH PROMOTION
Box 2.1 Questions to reflect on regarding the concepts of mental health
• Consider what the different definitions of mental health have in common and what
their differences are.
• How might different concepts of mental health influence your practice?
• In what way does culture affect the meaning and interpretation of mental health?
• Consider some of the dilemmas that might arise in mental health promotion as
a result of potential tensions between an individualistic and an ecological
approach.
• Does the current theory base draw on practice or does practice draw on theory?
Notes
1 This refers to a theory that any complex system can be fully understood in terms of its
simple, component parts.
2 Terms that I have put in quote marks – like ‘patient’, ‘illness’, etc. – signify that I think
there is something not quite right about accepting these terms at face value. I am trying
to indicate that we need to be wary of how these terms are being used and the meanings
they carry.
3 Crawford (1977) introduces the term to describe the emergence of an ideology which
seeks to justify retrenchment from rights and entitlements (to health care and to
health protection) and to divert attention from the ‘social causation of disease in the
commercial and industrial sectors’ (Crawford 1977: 663).
4 These are admittedly a small and Western selection of definitions. However, perhaps the
act of seeking knowledge by defining things is a particularly Western approach. Ways of
thinking about mental health derived from non-Western cultures are dealt with later in
the chapter.
5 This is an argument based on a word view called social constructivism. For a good
introduction, see Burr 1995.
6 Antonovsky undertook unstructured interviews with 51 people described as having
undergone severe trauma : 18: severe disability; 11: the loss of a loved one; 10: difficult
economic conditions; 8: concentration camp; 4: immigration from the USSR.
7 See MacDonald, G. (2000) for a fuller analysis of Seedhouse’s contribution.
References
Albee, G.W. (1982) Preventing psychopathology and promoting human potential, American
Psychologist, 37(9): 1043–50.
Albee, G.W. (1992) Keynote speech, in D.R. Trent and C. Reed (eds) Promotion of Mental
Health, vol.2. Aldershot: Avebury.
Albee, G.W. and Ryan Finn, K.D. (1993) An overview of primary prevention, Journal of
Counselling and Development, 72(2): 115–23.