Behavioral Health vs Mental Health

My perspectives stem from conscious thinking, science, nursing, and public health. My target audience is everyone, so the language is as non-medical and neutral as possible. I challenge my readers to dream, imagine, and consider contradictions and controversies, encouraging them to make their interpretations. As an opinion column, it is not data-driven or intended to replace any research study.

Behavioral health has become a relatively widely used term in recent years. Hundreds of studies have been conducted, and an?abundance of data is?available if we are?to write a journal article. Here, I am dissecting these terms and playing with these words.

Behavioral health concerns human behavior. Behavior is a collective term for the pattern of activities?and?how we react and respond to different things. Behavior is a starting level, which means the basic level of human thoughts, emotions, and actions. These thoughts, emotions, and actions are still in the abstract phase and not fully formed or consolidated within us. These abstracts are inconsistent patterns that?can be modified by several interventions according to age, gender, circumstances, interests, etc. For example, an elementary school kid may change his behavior with a reward system. In contrast, a teenager may change his behavior during a?counseling session, and a stressed-out individual may change his behavior with a sound support system. Furthermore, a burnout working professional may change his behavior if his needs are heard.

Therefore, I believe behavioral health resonates more with the?prevention phase of health.

However, when we say behavioral health, it is easy to confuse it?with mental health.

Mental health reflects a more solidified or fixed set of behavior patterns, which are now more consistent enough to harm our health and impair our daily activities.

For example, Anxiety and Depression are very tricky words.

Anxiety is easy to experience in daily life, and it is a normal human response to uncertainty. Similarly, depression can be a common state of mind or emotion in the face of loss or failure. At this stage, I would call these terms a behavior problem. But when these behavior starts affecting our health and impair our daily living, then these are mental illnesses.

My purpose in discussing these two terms was to conclude that we perhaps need to focus more on behavioral health and less on mental health.

Behavioral health is preventive health. Preventive health sounds non-therapeutic, with no prescription medications required and a?healthy lifestyle, which may appear to be easily attainable but requires tremendous work. Behavioral health may be integrated with several contributing factors such as housing environment, parents’ employment, parental education status, children's school system, availability of nutritious foods every person can afford, and safe neighborhoods. It may appear as running one mile a day to maintain?good health. Prevention means trying to change ourselves every day.

In this context, managing mental health is relatively straightforward. We are under the care of a psychiatrist, and the pills are fixing us. After the initial visit to the Psychiatrist, our subsequent visits are less than 10 minutes each via Zoom. Our psychiatrist will not even ask us, “How are you feeling?” but titrate our pills for anxiety and depression as tonics. Unknowingly, several years pass by, and before we even realize we are not only dependent but addicted to those pills. We forget our natural immune power to overcome these issues and our capabilities to transform ourselves.

Therefore, we must understand the initial changes that are happening to us and modify these changes before they turn into mental health problems. Early intervention in behavioral health is vital, and healthcare organizations can help this population by investing more in these interventions.

I would appreciate any thoughts and discussions on this.