Mental health like physical health describes a ‘state’ that we are in at any given moment. This ‘state’ exists along a continuum from good to poor mental health. It will have an impact on how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. It affects our ability to cope with the ups and downs of daily life, our ability to relate to others in a meaningful way, our ability to make decisions and our motivation to achieve our goals and desires. Poor mental health can lead to varying degrees of distress or difficulty for us. The state of our mental health can also have a huge impact on our physical health affecting our level of activity, eating habits and impacting our heart health.
The causes of poor mental health are often complicated; with several factors coming together to have a negative effect. Some of these factors will be personal and will relate to us as an individual, such as our personal history or our current life situation. These can include recent or past trauma, difficulties in personal relationships, abuse, grief or loss. However, there are also social or environmental factors which will contribute to poor mental health, and these can include poverty or having little access to life opportunities, debt, homelessness or being in poor housing, unemployment, unstable or unrewarding work, and being the victim of crime, harassment or racism.
Many of us will experience states of poor mental health which are also called mental health disorders or mental health problems. These are relatively common and are considered treatable through prescribed medicine, talking therapy or a combination of the two. Mental health problems include depression, anxiety, phobias, eating problems, and OCD.
How Can Counselling Help?
The counselling process can help encourage positive mental health in a number of different ways. The very nature of being heard and accepted by another person without judgement can have a huge reparative impact on us as can the development of a therapeutic relationship with the counsellor. Within this relationship we can see the counsellor model what supportive and non-judgemental relationships are supposed to be like, something we may never have experienced before. Alongside this relationship, the counselling process will involve us setting one or more goals and a collaborative approach to reaching these. This can have benefits by helping us to focus on what we want to change or achieve and by empowering us to (with the counsellor beside us) find our own solutions.
According to the CPCAB, there are three areas or dimensions in which counselling can help promote positive mental health. These are the internal dimension; our thoughts and feelings and how we relate to ourselves. The relational dimension; which covers relationship issues that we might experience and how we relate to others. And finally, there is the developmental dimension; which is made up of life stage issues that we might have encountered and how we relate to our past. It has been suggested that counselling encourages positive mental health through promoting simultaneous change across all three of these dimensions. Within the internal dimension, counselling can help us to change the ways we relate to ourselves, which in turn can foster greater resilience and better help us cope with the problems we face. In the relational dimension; counselling can help in supporting us with identifying and changing habitual patterns of perception, communication and in the way we interact with others. This can help to build more honest, open and mutually supportive relationships. Within the developmental dimension, counselling can help us to change the way we relate to our past and can include changing an implicit emotional response to past trauma.
Fostering the development of resilience, identifying and changing negative patterns of thought or behaviour in our relationships, and helping to process past events will all help with improving our mental health. And, whilst counselling can’t reduce the social or environmental factors that can negatively impact us; feeling more resilient, more grounded and less troubled will most likely leave us better able to cope with those problems and work towards finding our own solutions.