What is meant by the mental health continuum?
Here a distinction is made between the mental health continuum and the seven stages of bereavement
People working in mental health and people conducive to terminology in mental health work will understand the mental health continuum to be very similar to the ‘seven stages of loss or bereavement’; which in itself stretches across the mental health continuum albeit contrawise.
The mental health continuum is a scale with four stages: healthy; reacting; injured, ill; in that order
Whereas the seven stages of grief, bereavement or loss, start from 'shock or disbelief', 'ill' is the final stage of the mental health continuum.
The next early stages of loss is ‘denial’; ‘guilt’; ‘anger’; ‘depression’and loneliness’, that later leads on to finally, 'reconstruction' and 'acceptance', which is good mental health. The contrawise correlation found in the mental health continuum is 'injured', 'reacting', and 'healthy'.
The interesting thing about these scales is that the stages of bereavement starts off with poor mental health with an improvement to good mental health; and the mental health continuum starts off with good mental health and descends into ill mental health. From this we can expect to find a cyclic progression of mental health that moves from healthy to ill (quite likely to be due to some form of grief or bereavement, such as a loss of liberty (financial, intimacy with a loved one, or just plain physically such as a custodial sentence or deportation). At this stage we leap off the mental health continuum onto the stages of bereavement, work our way through better and better phases of mental health and back onto the mental health continuum, perhaps plateauing with a period of acceptance of our condition. We can see this as being cyclic or as intermittent waves.
Of course, this is a little tortuous and tenuous until we consider that breavement often leads to mental distress and mental ill-health so I have included a catalyst in the cycle. It seems clear theat the descent into mental ill-health is rapid and the recovery is a much longer process, perhaps taking years to reach acceptance and healthy.
Or: - the 'reacting' phase in the four stage scale of the mental health continuum can be considered to be a temporary or reversible mental stress, such as the entire loss or bereavement scale encompasses. However, this is unlikely, since the two scales are not parallel and can only realistically be considered to be reciprocating scales. It is far more likely that 'reacting' is 'anger', 'depression and loneliness'; and 'reconstruction' and 'healthy' (mental health continuum) is 'acceptance' (7 stages of loss or bereavement) of a circumstance.