What personality can teach us about mental health

While there have been forty years of active debate among philosophers of psychiatry about how to define mental disorder, there has been relatively little discussion of mental health. This is starting to change. A new literature is emerging about what it means to have mental health. While some define mental health as simply as the absence of mental disorder, others argue to the contrary that mental health is distinct from, and not reducible to, the presence or absence of mental illness. In this paper we review competing accounts and develop our own account. We characterize a diverse set of dispositions, skills, habits, and capacities, associated with aspects of personality structure. These are some of the same capacities developed across many psychotherapies. Attention to the literature on personality, and clinical psychotherapy, can, in our view, illuminate one (of several) dimensions of positive mental health.