Notes after a conversation with Tony Bates, CEO Headstrong “The National Centre for Youth Mental Health”

24/2/2010

Dear Tony
I thoroughly enjoyed our encounter yesterday and appreciate you making time for it in the midst of your chaos.
As always, my thoughts continue to form long afterwards, and I am still formulating an answer to the question what is mental health for a young person?

My first note is that any solution to this question should be valid regardless of age, so: what is mental health for a person?

The ideas I offered yesterday were a start:

• mental health includes an ability to move between or among different positions where unique and different vantage points or organising principles compose a particular reading of ‘reality’

• also the ability to hold oneself on a particular position at will, maintaining a steady picture,

• and further, the ability to integrate the experiences or information gained from these differing positions into one’s own personal story.

This is a fundamentally creative activity, and a lifetime’s work.

But I would go further still. ‘Mental health’ is not a finite state, or even attitude, it is a process. It is the process of learning to master the three abilities above. One never achieves this mastery: progress, not perfection…

But this is still not it, because I suggest that this process can not be conducted in a vacuum. I propose therefore that we think of mental health as a distributed, emergent, relational phenomenon. It arises in a system where each person’s own process is supported by their interactions with others, and by consciously crafted spaces/processes that hold, contain, and support these processes.

So mental health is actually a property of a system. It is both the person’s dance of the perceptual imagination, and the system’s choreography of support.

I believe that as people concerned with producing a better state of affairs for the mental health of our people, and ourselves, it would be most profitable to consider this a question of ecology

How should human society be structured; what form should it take now?
… That alone would be ecology if we could grasp this ecological question at its root… Ecology goes further, reaches further, and relates to the social organism’s capacity for life
Joseph Beuys, What is Art?

The particular situation of the young person is the need to have this lifetask process articulated and modelled and supported, but the learning of the young person should be learning for life, and should be socially supported throughout their lives.