What is mental health?

How our thoughts are affected

All of us will experience both good mental health and poor mental health during our life.

Mental health difficulties and distress can show in different ways. We can be affected in our thoughts and feelings or relationships. Our ability to manage the everyday tasks and challenges of life may also be affected.

Some people feel very sad or worried. Some might find it really hard to deal with school, work or college.

Others might have a difficult relationship with their own body, or unusual experiences such as hearing voices. Our mental health includes moments of great distress and pain, as well as everyday sense of wellbeing and resilience.

What is going on can be obvious to others, like when someone gets very angry or upset a lot. Or it can be something that stays hidden and difficult for others to see or understand. If someone feels very worried or thinks very negatively about themselves, it could remain private and unnoticed by others.

What challenges our mental health?

Challenges to our mental health can be relatively brief. Or persist for many years, to come and go over time. Mental health difficulties rarely have one definite cause. They usually involve the combination of a lot of different factors.

To understand someone’s mental health, we need to look broadly at what is going on in their life right now.

We also need to consider what has happened in the past. Things like relationships, levels of stress, physical health, experiences growing up, thinking style and significant life events are important. These might contribute to our mental health, either positively or negatively.

Mental health difficulties and emotional distress are often an understandable response to events or circumstances in our lives. In Jigsaw, we believe we all have mental and emotional health that needs to be looked after.

It will change depending on our life experience and circumstances. We also know that we will all experience difficulties and distress at times in our lives.

How we talk about mental health difficulties

There are a range of different ways of thinking about and talking about mental health. In Jigsaw, we prefer to use everyday language to describe mental health difficulties. So we tend not to use medical words like ‘illness’, ‘diagnosis’ or ‘disorder’.

However, we know this way of understanding mental health fits for some people and that’s OK. In our experience we find it more useful to use the language of the young people we work with.

This helps us to remember that each person has an experience of problems that is unique to them. Everyone experiences sadness at times. But because we all live unique lives the feelings, thoughts and responses we have will be personal to us.

So, instead of trying to answer the question ‘what is wrong with you?’ we find it more helpful to ask questions like:

• What would you like to be different?
• What is still going well despite the difficulties?
• What has happened to make you think or feel this way?
• What are you good at?
• What do people appreciate about you?
• Who understands this best?
• Who could help and support you with it?

Support for mental health

All professionals agree anyone experiencing mental health difficulties, or worries about their mental health, should be able to access support.

Support can come in many different ways. It could be self-directed, through self-help books or mental health apps.  It could be from a friend, member of your family, professional or a combination depending on what’s going on.

Sometimes just knowing everyone goes through difficult times, or getting a slightly different view on what’s bothering you, can help.

Learn more about speaking to a member of the Jigsaw team with our 1:1 Live Chats here.