Someone once said something about mental health that stayed with me:
“We all have mental health. It is the challenges to our mental health that can sometimes lead to mental illness.”
It was not a complicated statement. That was probably why it stayed with me.
Mental health is often discussed as though it belongs to a particular group of people, the person who sees a psychiatrist, the person taking psychiatric medication, the person who has been admitted to a mental health facility, the person whose behaviour has become so difficult to understand that someone finally says, “There must be something wrong with them.”
But mental health does not begin at diagnosis.
The World Health Organization (2025a) defines mental health as a state of well-being that allows people to cope with life’s stresses, realise their abilities, work and learn productively, and contribute to their community. It stresses that mental health sits on a complex continuum, shaped at any given time by a mix of individual, family, community and structural factors (World Health Organization, 2025a).
That means mental health is not a simple line dividing the healthy from the mentally ill. There is a person somewhere between those two ideas. Perhaps that is where we need to begin.
We Become Certain Before We Become Curious
In my work with clients and families, I keep encountering something that concerns me: we can become very certain about people without ever becoming curious about them.
We call a child disrespectful. We call a young person stubborn. We call a partner difficult. We call someone who withdraws antisocial. We call someone who struggles to function lazy. We call someone in psychological distress weak.
Sometimes those descriptions carry a grain of truth, people can behave in harmful, frustrating and irresponsible ways, and mental health awareness should never become an excuse for removing responsibility from people. But there is a difference between holding someone accountable for their behaviour and deciding that their behaviour tells us everything we need to know about who they are. That distinction matters.
What Changes When We Look Closer
I remember a client who expected therapy to be complicated, psychological terminology, elaborate explanations, someone telling them what was wrong with them. Instead, through talking and reflecting, they arrived at something simpler: they recognised how rigid they had become.
What struck me wasn’t the insight itself, but how different the person seemed once they could see their own behaviour more clearly. Therapy hadn’t produced a new person. It had created enough space for the person who was already there to be understood.
I’ve seen the same shift happen in family therapy. Families often arrive with a story that already has a conclusion, someone is the problem, someone is difficult, someone has disappointed everyone, someone needs to change. Because families love one another, these judgments come wrapped in fear, disappointment, frustration and genuine concern. But concern doesn’t automatically produce understanding. Sometimes we blame people simply because we don’t know what else to do with behaviour that frightens or frustrates us.
Then the conversation changes. Someone explains what they’ve been experiencing. Someone else starts listening differently. A parent discovers that what looked like defiance was connected to something they never understood. A partner realises that what felt like rejection was being experienced very differently on the other side.
Families don’t necessarily leave agreeing about everything. But they leave with more information, and sometimes clarity changes the entire conversation.
Understanding Is Not the Same as Excusing
This is something I’ve come to appreciate about psychological work: understanding does not mean excusing.
- You can understand why someone behaves the way they do and still expect them to take responsibility for what they do.
- You can recognise the influence of trauma without turning it into an explanation for every harmful behaviour.
- You can understand addiction without pretending it has no consequences.
- You can recognise psychological distress without stripping away a person’s agency.
Understanding simply gives us a better starting point, and that’s something we need well beyond the therapy room, because we live in a world where people are often interpreted before they are understood.
A young person is compared to another who seems to be doing better. A child is seen mainly through the expectations attached to being someone’s child. A man feels pressure to stay strong even while he’s struggling. A person in psychological distress stays silent because they expect judgment rather than understanding.
When people can’t explain their struggles in ways others recognise, we fill in the gaps ourselves. We create stories about them. Sometimes those stories become labels, and labels have consequences.
The Cost of Stigma
Mental illness still carries stigma, discrimination and misunderstanding in many communities. The World Health Organization (2025b) identifies stigma and discrimination, along with violations of human rights, as major barriers standing between people with mental disorders and the care they need. Research from Kenya reflects the same pattern: a pilot study using the WHO’s mhGAP intervention guide in rural Makueni County found that stigma has a direct, damaging effect on help-seeking, treatment adherence and recovery for people with mental disorders (Mutiso et al., 2019), and community-based work in Kilifi County has similarly examined how mental-illness stigma shapes people’s willingness to seek support (Bitta et al., 2022).
The tragedy is that stigma doesn’t only tell people that mental illness is shameful. It also teaches people that they won’t be understood if they speak. And when people are afraid to speak, the people around them are left interpreting behaviour without the information they need.
Becoming More Curious About People
This is where the conversation about mental health needs to become more human. Mental health awareness shouldn’t only teach us to recognise symptoms, it should teach us to become more curious about people.
Before asking, “What is wrong with this person?”, perhaps we should sometimes ask:
- What am I not seeing?
- What might this person be experiencing?
- What happened before this behaviour?
- What story have I created about them?
- Have I actually tried to understand them?
Because sometimes the person we call difficult is struggling to communicate something they don’t yet know how to explain. Sometimes the person we call stubborn is protecting a belief, fear or pattern that has become deeply familiar to them. Sometimes the person we call weak has been carrying something quietly for a very long time.
And sometimes a person really is behaving badly. We need enough psychological maturity to hold all of these possibilities at once.
The goal is not to stop judging behaviour altogether. The goal is to become careful about turning behaviour into identity.
There is a human being behind the behaviour. And before we decide who that person is, perhaps we should take the time to understand them.
References
Bitta, M. A., Baariu, J., Fondo, E., Kariuki, S. M., Lennox, B., & Newton, C. R. J. C. (2022). Validating measures of stigma against those with mental illness among a community sample in Kilifi Kenya. Global Mental Health, 9, 241–248. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-mental-health/article/validating-measures-of-stigma-against-those-with-mental-illness-among-a-community-sample-in-kilifi-kenya/2D52076FC0E4BCBE2E2F71905BDB8261
Mutiso, V. N., Musyimi, C. W., Rebello, T. J., Gitonga, I., Tele, A., Pike, K. M., & Ndetei, D. M. (2019). Feasibility of WHO mhGAP-intervention guide in reducing experienced discrimination in people with mental disorders: A pilot study in a rural Kenyan setting. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6999029/
World Health Organization. (2025a). Mental health [Fact sheet]. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response
World Health Organization. (2025b). Mental disorders [Fact sheet]. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders
By PSY Opil Samuel.
