Mental Health Introduction

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Mental HealthIntroduction
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Mental/Emotional Health

• The ability to accept yourself and others, adapt
  to and manage emotions, and deal with demands and
  challenges you meet in life.

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Characteristics of Good Mental/Emotional Health

• Positive Self-Esteem
• Confidence in yourself and able to accept
  challenges and take failure in stride
• Sense of Belonging
• Attachment to family, friends, and others around
  you for comfort and it promotes stability
• Sense of Purpose
• Recognizing own value and importance helps to
  achieve goals
• Positive Outlook
• Seeing the bright side of having hope
• Autonomy
• Confidence to make responsible decisions and
  promotes self-assurance

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Personality

• A set of characteristics that makes you unique

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Influences on Personality

• Heredity
• Determine a persons basic intellectual ability
  and temperament or emotional tendencies
• Environment
• Everything that surrounds you in day-to-day life
• Modeling- observing and learning from behaviors
  of those around you
• Behavior
• The one that you have the most control over.
  Decisions you make, consequences, etc.

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Personal Identity

• Your sense of yourself as a unique individual
• Interests, likes/dislikes, talents/abilities,
  values/beliefs, and goals
• Short-term goals
• Long-term goals

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Emotions

• Signals that tell your mind and body how to react
• Hormones are secreted by the glands and regulate
  the activities of different body cells
• Happy, Sad, Love, Empathy
• Ability to imagine and understand how someone
  else feels
• Fear
• From an imagined threat can lead to not leading a
  normal life- turn into phobia
• Guilt, Anger, Hostility
• Intentional use of unfriendly or offensive
  behavior

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Common Defense Mechanisms

• Repression
• Involuntary pushing of unpleasant feelings out of
  conscious thought
• Suppression
• Conscious, intentional pushing of unpleasantness
  from ones mind
• Rationalization
• Making excuses to explain a situation or behavior
  rather than taking responsibility for it
• Regression
• Reverting to behaviors more characteristic of an
  earlier stage of development rather than dealing
  with the conflict in a mature manner

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Defense Mechanisms Cont.

• Denial
• Unconscious lack of acknowledgement of something
  that is obvious to others
• Compensation
• Making up for weakness and mistakes through
  gift-giving, hard work, or extreme efforts
• Projection
• Attributing your own feelings or faults to
  another person or group
• Idealization
• Seeing someone else as perfect, ideal, or more
  worthy than everyone else