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If its all a construction of the brain, then indeed "all illness is in some ways mental illness." And we should stop distinguishing between "real" problems and those that are instead "all in the head"? Find a "less wrong" way to distinguish, for example, between a pain originating from an injury to the leg and a comparable pain experienced in someone not having a leg? Recognize that the state of the brain may well have impacts not only on the experience of the injured leg but on the injured leg itself? Yes, there may well be implications here not only for thinking about "mental" health but health in general. And yes, there is "a role in this conversation for the nature of conscious and unconscious thought." We'll get there this coming Monday.

Nice to have Fromm on the table too. Outside Britain (which I was when I ran onto it), the book was published as Escape from Freedom. Fromm certainly encouraged people to "live actively and spontaneously" but he also suggested that such freedom coud, depending on the state of society, become "an unbearable burden ... identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction." Sounds like "full realization of the individual's potentials," like other ways to characterize "mental health," is dependent on cultural context.