What is mental health? Expert responses from the Centers for Disease Control and U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration quickly turn to a discussion of mental illness. The terms have not always been conflated. “Mental health is not — or not only — the mere absence of mental illness,” says Anya Plutynski, PhD, professor of philosophy and a scholar of the history of science. Her research on early 20th-century “mental hygiene” practitioners shows that some providers of the era operated under a definition of mental health that was equally concerned with identifying factors and skills that promoted mental health and prevented symptoms of mental illness from arising. Over time, however, their ideas have been forgotten or dismissed as bad science. “It’s common for folks to think that science makes progress and so ‘new’ ideas are better,” she says, whether or not those assumptions have been evaluated.
With her new book project, “Making Mental Health,” Plutynski, a Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Humanities, is not only writing a narrative history of the concept of mental health but shedding new light on larger debates in the philosophy of science concerning evidence, explanation and the role of values in science. Below, she offers an early look at her book-in-progress.