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Maybe mental health is a human project and not a healthy/ill dichotomy. Maybe we should operate on the premise that everyone needs “help.” If there were consensus that everyone has the potential to be a “better” version of oneself than some of the stigma associated with experiencing distressing mental states and seeking help would dissipate. If mental health is not static, but a process of a ever-refining one’s story, so as to maximize one’s potential then the necessity of reducing a person to her behavior, her symptoms, her “limitations” would cease to be relevant and each of us would be less inhibited in the process of honing our skill sets, coming up with a “tool kit” of sorts that is tailored to our individual genes, our individual experiences.

I found the discussion about “reciprocity” in health care intriguing. I think, too often, the inherent dynamism of the doctor and patient relationship is not acknowledged and utilized to its fullest. It was suggested in class that the patient affects the doctor, who affects the patient and then back around… If mental health were less geared towards the mental health worker “affecting” the patient, changing her, there might be some room left over for the reality that we are all affected by each other. I don’t think the goal of mental health should be to “change” someone, but to facilitate exploration and enable agency, choice, by unburdening the individual of story-telling features that may not be constructive for that individual. “Help” does not have to come in the form of a defined beginning and set of endpoints to measure “success,” rather can be an ongoing process or project. Sometimes people may not “want” help or even be aware that they are experiencing internal conflict, in which cases, it is ever more necessary to employ the dynamic relationship between mental health worker and patient, in order for the mental health worker to assist the individual in achieving goals that she herself may have yet to articulate. We trust physicians to be “experts” in other areas of the body, where symptoms and treatments are equally vague as with mental health. Why can we not trust that sometimes someone on the outside has a clearer vision than the person on the inside?