Preventing mental disorder and promoting mental health: some implications for understanding wellbeing

ABSTRACT In this paper, I consider the debates surrounding the prevention of mental disorder and the promotion of mental health. In so doing, I offer some provisional insights into the wider notion of wellbeing. All three topics – mental disorder, mental health and wellbeing – imply generative mechanisms of some sort. By considering these mechanisms as ontological entities, we can appraise the relationship between human agency and its biological, social and economic constraints. This provides us with an understanding of bio-psycho-social causal loops, fluxing across time and space, which avoids a reductionist explanation of wellbeing. I also describe how the critical realist concept of four planar social being (our relationship to the natural world, one another, embedding social and economic structures, and our unique biographies) can further assist in the development of a holistic understanding of mental health and mental disorder.