MCCA is a
State chapter of the
American
Mental Health Counselors Association
MCCA is a
State chapter of the
American
Mental Health Counselors Association
the MCCA Newsletter is published quarterly with a lot of good information and a chance to get to know other LCPCs in the state.
By: Amy L. Simonds, LCPC
American Mental Health Counselors Association
North Atlantic Regional Director
Have you ever taken a mental health screening or obtained a full comprehensive assessment? What did it tell you? Did you get a true report about your mental health or a report of mental illness? At best, you might have been told you don’t meet medical necessity criteria for treatment because you don’t have a diagnosable illness, but is that a measure of your mental health? Does a measure of mental health even matter? As I began to prepare for “May is Mental Health Month" and spread the good word about what our field is up to, these are the questions that came to mind. How would you know, empirically, if you had strong mental health? Are there diagnostic criteria for being mentally healthy? Actually, yes, there are.
In my questioning and searching, I was directed to the work of Dr. Corey L.M. Keyes, who has coined the terms “languishing" and “flourishing" in deepening a concept of mental health and mental illness as a continuum. Historically, we’ve considered mental health to simply be an absence of mental illness (Keyes, 2005). Keyes has developed a continuum in which languishing is just one step above mental illness followed by moderately mentally healthy and flourishing. In addition, Dr. Keyes has developed and tested actual diagnostic criteria for flourishing. While the diagnostic categories for Major Depressive Episode include at least one symptom of anhedonia and four or more symptoms of malfunctioning, flourishing requires meeting one of two criteria for hedonia and six or more of eleven symptoms of positive functioning (2005). Dr. Keyes tested her theories to determine how the American public fit on the continuum. These results were published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 2005 and indicate most Americans, six in ten, were moderately mentally healthy (2005).
A question arises around why this is important to us. The language Dr. Keyes uses is very powerful. Languishing is the mere absence of mental illness. I, for one, have not made a professional investment in helping people languish. The question becomes even more complex when we consider our field as an industry. If you are an insurance company, is languishing good enough to discontinue coverage of mental health treatment? In her 2005 study, Dr. Keyes correlated mental health to overall physical health. Adults who were languishing were less productive in their work and were found to be equally as functional as those who experienced mental illness (2005). Adults experiencing anything less than flourishing also had significant physical health limitations including increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease (2005).
In closing, I’ll remind the reader my own inquiry was in preparation for “May is Mental Health Month", which is sponsored by Mental Health America (formerly the National Mental Health Association). The American Mental Health Counselors Association is the only organization working exclusively for the mental health counseling profession and proudly joins Mental Health America in this endeavor. MCCA, The Maine Clinical Counselors Association, is the chartered branch of AMHCA representing LCPCs in Maine. I hope everyone doing clinical work can use this information as a spring board to consider and discuss how the concepts of languishing and flourishing might change your experience of how you work and how you live.