Mental health
level of psychological well-being
Mental health encompasses emotional, psychological, and social well-being, influencing cognition, perception, and behavior. Mental health plays a crucial role in an individual's daily life when managing stress, engaging with others, and contributing to life overall. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it is a "state of well-being in which the individual realizes their abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and can contribute to their community". It likewise determines how an individual handles stress, interpersonal relationships, and decision-making. Mental health includes subjective well-being, perceived self-efficacy, autonomy, competence, intergenerational dependence, and self-actualization of one's intellectual and emotional potential, among others.
Mental health also includes emotional, psychological, and social well-being, and it affects how people manage stress and make everyday decisions.
From the perspectives of positive psychology or holism, mental health is thus not merely the absence of mental illness. Rather, it is a broader state of well-being that includes an individual's ability to enjoy life and to create a balance between life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience. Cultural differences, personal philosophy, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories all affect how one defines "mental health".
Mental disorders
Mental health, as defined by the Public Health Agency of Canada, is an individual's capacity to feel, think, and act in ways to achieve a better quality of life while respecting personal, social, and cultural boundaries.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mental health” is level of psychological well-being. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mental, health and level, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q317309. The Library of Congress control number is sh85083615. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mental health” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.