Mental Health: Part 1, Clarified

The term "mental health," if understood in its most general form, describes the maintenance of a broad and variable state of being that any given individual may experience at any given moment in their psychological life.  It maybe important to keep in mind that the more general a description the less likely any practical value can be found in what is being described; however, great value can be found if the general formulation can provide a foundation for further detail and clarification of the underlying idea.

The term mental health sets the stage for the further exploration of an underlying idea that too can just as easily become overly generalized, and is assuredly, on the face of it, a much more initially complicated idea: psychology.  Further the idea of an individual's mental health is potentially meaningless if that individual's "psychology" is not folded into the exploration of the definition.  While each of these terms may be interchangeable, they may also point toward something slightly different, but that the idea of mental health is dependent upon the idea of an individual's psychology.

Mental health is the care an individual requires in the maintenance of their "mental" state, just as it was described at the beginning of this section you are reading.  The mental aspect is none other than their psychology.  When looking at a persons mental health, we are not looking at their cognitive abilities--even though Cognitive Behavioral modals do just this, we are not looking at their intellectual abilities--even though an individual's intellect is a peripheral area of interest.  The area that is most directly related to an individual's mental health is their psychology.

For the direct purposes of clarification the terms must not be interchangeable.  Interchangeability indicates sameness and if the terms are the same then one of them is potentially irrelevant; therefore, the terms are not interchangeable, and instead, complimentary.  If we understand and agree that an individual's mental health is related to its maintenance and the "maintenance" has to do with the variability of the states of being which are either functional, or dysfunctional (i.e. the individual's psychology), then we have a clearer foundation on which to construct a detailed path to the maintenance of an individual's mental health.

And maybe that with the above clarification the remaining question can be simplified without becoming an over simplification:

     What then is an individual's psychology and how is it related to variable states of being (which is more than likely highly connected to their emotions states)?