Reading: Transcript - Introduction

Welcome to the short class on mental health integration. I am Brandon Appelhans; I am going to be your professor on this little journey. I don't normally think of myself as a professor; I've run nonprofits and been in ministry for a long time. I've taught courses, but I just prefer to be called Brandon.

So a little bit about me and why we're teaching this course. This course is really, really personal to me. I was diagnosed with a mental illness when I was just 14 years old. And so processing through mental illness, and the church and theology and who is Jesus. This has been a big piece of my journey over the last number of years. After becoming a Christian, when I was 18, I went on to seminary and trained to be a pastor. And while I was still in seminary, I started a nonprofit working with faith communities, trying to help them work with mental health issues. That's actually how I got plugged into this work, was doing it on the ground for the better part of a decade with pretty much everything.

That said, mental health issues are really a big issue; we're going to, this is a short class, we're going to be doing nine small segments. This is by no means like a full, everything you need to know about mental health class, this is going to be a really, really quick survey. But hopefully you get the knowledge and information that you need, in order to make better decisions and to work in the world of mental health just a little bit better.

Full shameless plug. The three-credit course version of this is available through CLI. So if this content is at all intriguing to you, check that out. Because while this is two hours long, that is a whole lot more, we go into a whole lot more depth on all of these topics, on what it means to be human on what the impacts are. So if this at all piques your interest that is available, and I would say I poured a lot into that course. So I would love if you took it. But that doesn't mean you need to just selfishly I want you to because I think there's a lot of really cool stuff in there. But since you've probably had professors before, you know that all of us think that what we study is the most important thing and we all want you to take our courses. So take that with what you will.

So let's jump into mental health. Mental health is the condition of being sound mentally and emotionally and is characterized by the absence of mental illness. And by adequate adjustment, especially as reflected in feeling comfortable about oneself, positive feelings about others, and the ability to meet the demands of daily life. Also the general condition that one's mental and emotional state, this is the definition from Merriam-Webster.

So we see mental health is this condition of "I am okay, I am good. I am just fine the way I am." So if we're telling you about mental health, that assumes kind of a level playing field and this is where most people are most of the time; we wouldn't say people are mentally ill in various stages. The average person, if you talk about them, is mentally stable; they're mentally well, okay, they're able to flourish in life. Another way of saneness.

Mental health is the psychological state of someone who's functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment. So they're acceptable. Being mentally healthy means that your mental health is acceptable enough that you can do what you want with your life. You can go, you can flourish, you can do stuff.

So what then what is mental illness? Any mental illness, AMI, and SMI are the two acronyms that you use for these. Any mental illness is defined as a mental behavioral or emotional disorder. AMI can vary In impact ranging from no impairment to mild, moderate, or even severe impairment. eg individuals with mental almost as defined below.

So if you have any mental illness, it means that there's something going on. It does not mean necessarily that it's so severe that you need to be stuck in an asylum or something like that. But it does mean that there is something going on that is affecting your daily life. Any mental illness affects a very big swath of the population. Overall, it's not a majority, it's still a significant minority, but it isn't enough to make a big difference overall.

SMI is or serious mental illnesses are a little bit more than that. A serious mental illness is defined as a behavioral or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment, which substantially interferes with, with or limits one or more major life activities. The burden of mental illness is particularly concentrated among those who experience disability is to a SMI.

In other words, a serious mental illness is such a big impairment that it can actually create a space where you are not able to work, you are unable, you are unable to interact, you are unable to do all the normal things of life. So if we said that having mental health was being on the level of being normal enough that you can actually flourish, that you have the capacity to do things, any mental illness might drop that capacity. And in the case of serious mental illness, it might just eliminate that capacity altogether.

Many people with serious mental illness are on disability in the United States; they don't have the ability to work. They are in positions where they're struggling to do a hold on to relationships or do normal things. There's rates of homelessness that can be high and severe mental illness. So there's a lot going on. As we proceed in this course, we're going to be talking more and more about who we are as people and why that matters and integrating theology in this. But to start out all you need to know is there's mental illnesses. There's serious mental illnesses; both of them affect our daily lives, but severe mental illnesses really do a lot more as far as hindering our ability to function as normal human beings, sometimes to the point where we can't function hardly. I'll see you in the next section.