Good mental health to all
On re-framing problems, PMI lists, and knowing the severe limits on what anyone can take away from psychology
Dr. Mark Lewis, an oncologist from Utah with a sizable social-media following, offers some tips for re-framing problems that have been helpful for him -- like disconnecting outcomes from self-worth and staying true to an internal yardstick of success rather than comparisons with others. They are well worth considering, particularly in the spirit of World Mental Health Day. They might well be the devices someone needs to hear today.
■ Different strategies work for different people. We are far from knowing the working of the mind well enough, categorically, to be able to treat people's mental wellness with the precision of, say, a prescription for eyeglasses. Improving on that frontier ought to be a high priority for society.
■ For many people, it would be a fair start to discern where they reside on a spectrum from "internal processor" to "external processor". It's often confused with introversion versus extroversion, but the two are not the same. An introvert may need to talk through problems, and an extrovert might feel compelled to think quietly in a space full of people.
■ Knowing which processing style prevails can help individuals work through those methods for framing problems with the best chance of success. An external processor, for example, might benefit from periodically writing out a list of stressors in order to take those problems out of the abstract mind and put them in a concrete, external place where they can be manipulated and contended with.
■ It may be easier for external processors to discern which problems call for a plan and which can be simply "let go", simply by putting them on a physical page. That technique might be utterly useless for an internal processor, who might find such a list jarring or aggravating as it intrudes on their interior thinking.
■ Contrasts like these tend to make a lot of pop psychology look ridiculous to at least half the audience at any given time. The "Plus-Minus-Interesting chart" may seem like a godsend to some and a total boat anchor to others, which is why anyone's list of hot tips has to come with either an implicit or (preferably) explicit list of contingent factors. Otherwise, a fair number of people may encounter that advice and come away either disappointed or frustrated.
■ There is no single path -- and certainly no shortcut -- to mental wellness and balance. But the path for each person needs to be constructed with some guidance towards self-awareness from the outset. Until we can diagnose a person's psychological makeup as reliably as we can test their cholesterol, there will remain a great deal of important work to do.
