Research Paper Title

What Does Mental Health Have to Do With Well-Being?

Background

Positive mental health involves not the absence of mental disorder but rather the presence of certain mental goods.

Institutions, practitioners, and theorists often identify positive mental health with well-being.

There are strong reasons, however, to keep the concepts of well-being and positive mental health separate.

Someone with high positive mental health can have low well-being, someone with high well-being can have low positive mental health, and well-being and positive mental health sometimes conflict.

But, while positive mental health and well-being are not identical, there is an informative conceptual connection between them.

Positive mental health usually contributes instrumentally to the living of a good human life, where a good human life includes (but is not limited to) well-being.

Reference

Keller, S. (2020) What Does Mental Health Have to Do With Well-Being? Bioethics. 34(3), pp.228-234. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12702. Epub 2019 Nov 29.