Publication

Abstract : Mental health refers to the development, preservation, prevention and treatment and enhancement of total personality in all its varied aspects. It deals with individuals, groups and social institutions as interdependent systems. According to the dual factor theory of mental health, both negative and positive aspects need to be considered together and not separately. While one deals with mental disorders, their prevention, diagnosis prognosis and treatment, the other deals with the positive aspects like sense of well-being, satisfaction in all spheres of life, adjustment, realization of ones' full potential including creativity and originality, looking forward to get support from others and later providing support to all others when and wherever required-according to ones' abilities. Thus mental health is not a mere absence of mental illness or mental ill health. It is definitely much more than that. Unfortunately, various health facilities like mental hospitals, government and private psychiatric nursing homes, psychiatric illness, child guidance centers, mental retardation homes, etc. deal more with the negative mental health while ignoring to a great extent, the positive aspects leaving it for the University Departments of Psychology to take up this issue or for the individual mental health workers.