Achieving Mental Health

It is absurd to view mental well-being as a specific fixed state; good mental health is not something that is suddenly achieved at the end of a series of steps. Nor is it attained because an individual’s previously neurotic state of tension has been reduced by the satisfaction of biological drives and impulses, as psychoanalysts recommended. Neither is it cultivated by following a specific program designed to develop and preserve a state of inner impermeable homeostasis, or balance, reducing the effect of the world’s external chaos on the self, as behaviorists recommended.

Noone exists in a defective state that needs to be fixed in order to provide them with a better state, because human experience, and our minds and environment, are alive and growing. This means that life can be seen as instantaneous and ongoing; life exists in the experience of every moment.

A healthy self-concept is not a fixed identity but a fluid and changing entity, open to possibilities. Human nature embraces an authentic unprescribed, free-flowing definition of healthy human experience, with limitless possibilities. Humans are not traveling a road where the destination is to become “adjusted” or “actualized”. Indeed, the purpose of existence is not about reaching any kind of destination, because existence is less a journey toward an endpoint and more an ongoing process of growth and discovery that does not stop until we die.