A response to the TED Article “How should we talk about mental health”

How should we talk about mental health?

Really, how should we talk about mental health? For one, I believe this article is talking about mental disease, not mental health. So we should call it what it is. Diseases like depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia are not ‘mental health’. They are the absence of health. They are diseases. We don’t talk about other chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes as ‘chronic health’. The nuances in language are extremely important here.

This article hits a lot of great points about breaking down the stigma around ‘mental health’, but maybe a better first step would be calling these problems what they really are, and they are mental disease, not mental health. ((Watch for my more extensive blog post re: where is the ‘health’ in ‘mental health’))