Resilient mental health

MIND MOVES: Yesterday was World Mental Health Day. Its theme worldwide, mental health across the lifespan, reveals the changing emphasis in discourses on mental health.

Debate has moved from focusing exclusively on the nature of mental illness to how we can promote and encourage positive mental health.

Studies have demonstrated that many people, despite starting life with lots of high-risk factors for mental illness, grow up to be individuals of a healthy disposition, enjoying happy and productive lives.

One study of children in Kauai identified a group of such high-risk children and followed their life course for 30 years to adulthood. Despite having parents with mental illness, being socially and economically disadvantaged, with limited educational opportunities, one-third of these children grew up to be confident, competent parents.

This finding, replicated in several similar longitudinal studies, raises the intriguing question as to what it is in some people that not only protects them from mental illness, but allows them to grow and flourish against all the odds, through troubled times.

The word that has emerged from several quarters and that seems to capture the essence of this protective health factor is resilience - that capacity in human beings to maintain, recover and even to improve their mental and physical health in the face of adversity.

How much of this quality is due to someone's genetic make-up as they face into life, and how much is due to positive life experiences and coping skills they are taught along the way, will remain the subject of debate for some time.

Biological and socio-economic factors undoubtedly play a role in enabling us to weather hardship, but key factors to building protection for humans appear to lie in our psychological outlook on life and in our ability to access interpersonal support from others.

Understanding more precisely the key elements that promote wellbeing and mental health allows us to consider what we may need to work at to improve our own resilience.

Knowing what protects and fosters mental health also allows us to consider what opportunities and skills we may want to encourage in our schools and communities, to equip our younger and vulnerable members of society for the tough times that they will inevitably face.

Psychologically, people who demonstrate resilience are people who trust their own capacity to deal with life, to make decisions independently, sometimes against the good advice of others, and to determine the course of their own lives.

Interpersonally they generally report positive relationships with others, and close relationships with at least a few.

Resilience is also associated with experiences of warm and supportive relationships with key people in their early lives, people who believed in them and who expected something of them.

Where that possibility of acceptance and affirmation wasn't available, or offered, in their immediate families, resilient adults will often identify an aunt, uncle or teacher whose encouragement was critical in forming their self-image and instilling in them a belief in their own potential.

Human beings need acceptance for who they are at any given moment of their lives, but equally important is the faith that others have in them for what they can become.

Believing we can confront adversity and grow through a particular bad patch helps a person to sustain their courage in the face of repeated setbacks.

Resilience enables you to engage with life at the edges of your comfort zone. To keep your head down, to stay safe and remain well below the radar, may buy you temporary relief and comfort, but as a coping strategy it won't sustain you. Life, regardless of how much you may wish it to leave you alone, has a habit of disrupting our best laid plans.

Resilient people are people who develop a habit of engaging with life's challenges - of moving towards that edge whatever it may be - rather than retreating in the face of the uncomfortable, the unpredictable or the unknown.

Resilience allows us to accept difficult experiences of our lives and learn to work with them rather than resent them or run for cover. Resilient people learn to shape themselves to changing circumstances, and to shape those circumstances to their own needs and abilities, rather than surrender passively and feel victimised.

Resilience is not only born of inner strength but out of a vital sense of humour.

It means being able to see the absurdity of life - the chaos and contradiction in our inner and outer worlds - and not lose the capacity to laugh at our self-importance, so burdened with pride and prejudice.

Resilience is a key factor in developing mental health.

It recognises that life is constantly changing and that the only way to survive is to learn to dance with chaos, knowing that it's all part of life's wonderful and crazy curriculum.

Tony Bates is a clinical psychologist and director of the Msc, Cognitive Psychotherapy at Trinity College Dublin.