The Covid-19 pandemic has engendered much talk about how the restrictions are affecting people’s mental health, but what do we mean by mental health.

Covid-19 has highlighted that the context of our lives is a significant factor for mental health, and that some of us will have greater resilience (i.e., the capacity to recover quickly from difficult situations) than others.

Mental health impacts on all aspects of our lives, on our thoughts, feelings, functioning and how we interact with others, and it is often claimed that one in four adults will experience mental ill-health at some point in their life.

Mental health, mental health problems, mental ill-health, mental illness, and mental distress are all terms that are being used to describe the emotional and psychological response to the challenges of everyday life. The use of such terms can be misleading and confusing. For something to be regarded as a mental illness a psychiatrist must make a diagnosis.

The help provided for the individual may take the form of counselling or psychotherapy, drug treatment and/or lifestyle change. However, mental ill-health often gets left with the individual and festers there.

A failure in the individual often underlies our view, encouraging a medical model, which is limited and unable to grasp and solve the problem. This is a convenient tag for policy makers to hang the problem of poor mental health upon because it avoids the pressure to provide for alternative social provision.

Focus on the ‘individual’s failure/malfunction’ can have the effect of encouraging judgmental thinking, prejudices, and stereotyping, which is detrimental to dealing effectively with the problem.

Education is vital in offering insight into mental health issues in helping communities to engender/create understanding and empathy and avoid failing to recognise when a person may be suffering or is being disadvantaged.

Education should aid an understanding of mental ill health as a complex issue set within a socio-economic context, and often within a judgemental and fearful cultural environment.

This means giving more consideration to factors such as our social support network, our environment, unpleasant housing conditions, abuse, financial struggle, poverty, gender, ethnicity, and class, and how we respond to these determinants of health.

The impact of Covid-19 has brought this commonplace, but often hidden reality to the surface. The vale has been lifted and many questions must be asked and answered. How should a community respond to what is a personal trouble and a social issue?

It is vital that people are enabled to engage in open and honest dialogue to gain insight into mental health and promote understanding from an early age in schools, colleges and in informal settings as part of lifelong learning.

Improved understanding needs to be embedded into the culture and ethos of our communities so that people are not afraid to speak openly due to stigma and discrimination.

We need to shift from a mind-set that asks, ‘what is wrong with that person’ to one that appreciates ‘what has happened to them’ because the roots of difficulties often lie outside the self. Education can help us all be more effective in giving support to and seeking support from others in a considerate, non-judgemental, and more informed way. The local authority can provide a lead for our community in that shift to better understanding.

Exmouth community education: Keith Edwards on mental health | Exmouth Journal