What are the standards for mental health?

At present, there are no global absolute mental health standards in psychology. Mainstream clinical judgments usually focus on the three core elastic states of "self-coordination, interpersonal harmony, and environmental adaptation." Essentially, what they look at is your "comfort" and "resilience" in getting along with the world around you. It does not require you to be happy forever, but to be able to cope with and overcome bad things.

I once met a junior student with a near-perfect grade point. Everyone thought she was so good that she shined, but she always felt that she was not good at everything. Even her roommate did not reply to messages in time and she felt that she was disgusting. She had insomnia until two or three o'clock every day. This state of being in a state of self-dimension, no matter how good others look, but she is always embarrassed, is a self-dimensional disharmony. Even if there is no obvious disease, it is not a healthy mental state. Many people have a typical misunderstanding about this standard. They think that you must always be active and happy to be healthy. In fact, this is not the case at all. I interviewed an Internet company operator a while ago. Last month, the project was cut off and the job was transferred. She cried for three days in a row and felt scared before going out every day. But she After crying, I would ask friends to eat hot pot and complain, and I also made a study list for my new position. I caught up with the rhythm in less than two weeks. This state of rapid recovery is actually a sign of mental health, just like a person with a good physique will not have a fever after being exposed to a little rain, and will recover after drinking a cup of hot water and sleeping.

In addition to popular misunderstandings, the academic community itself does not have a completely unified conclusion on the standards of mental health. Different research directions and different cultural backgrounds have different judgment tendencies. For example, the school of psychoanalysis pays more attention to whether early trauma unconsciously affects current decision-making. Humanism pays more attention to whether you have grown in the direction of self-expectations. The cross-cultural differences are even greater. A previous social psychology study mentioned that in a collectivist culture, it is a normal value choice to put family responsibilities before personal needs. We cannot directly judge this as "self-sacrificial mental illness" based on the standards of Western individualism. I once had a female visitor in her 40s who temporarily quit her job to accompany her child to high school. People around her always said that she had lost herself, but she herself felt that her life was very solid. After her child graduated, she returned to the workplace to do maternal and child-related content, and she developed better than before. This choice of not being stubborn is not a problem at all.

It is precisely because the standards are flexible that there is no need for everyone to rely on scattered opinions on the Internet and label themselves "moderately depressed" when they take a test. The real clinical evaluation is very rigorous and needs to be comprehensively judged based on the duration of the state and the degree of impact on normal life. If you are only in a bad mood in the past week and can eat, sleep and go to work normally, then it is most likely just an ordinary emotional cold and is far from a psychological abnormality.

To put it bluntly, mental health is never a perfect state. There is no need to force yourself to be positive all the time. As long as you are comfortable with yourself most of the time, have boundaries when interacting with people around you, and can slowly adjust to changes when encountering changes, you are already good.