Welcome to this lesson on, ‘What is mental health’?
We all have mental health, think of it like you think of physical health. We can have good mental health the same way we can have poor mental health, and while the focus of mental health awareness is often on those people going through what can be emotional challenges, it is critical that we all learn strategies to care for our mental health. 
Let’s quickly have look at 2 terms that will appear throughout the course.
Mental Illness is a health condition which involves changes in emotion, thinking or behavior and is a diagnosable condition which persists for more than two weeks.
Mental Wellbeing is very similar to mental health. It is a term we use to describe a wider set of feelings and thoughts that influence our emotions. It is dynamic and can change day to day. It describes your mental state and can affect how we think, feel, and act. 
This training is designed to help raise dialogue and awareness about mental health and wellbeing and when we come to focus on mental wellbeing later on, we will explore how to produce actionable strategies to help us in our daily lives. 
One of the key aims within this training is too provide you with the awareness and skills to act, rather than being able to offer any sort of counselling service of which the majority of us are untrained for. 
A challenge that professional practitioners face in diagnosing a specific mental illness is that many of the different illnesses very often present the same indicators. It is not up to us to second guess what mental illness a person may have but to sign post them towards the support they need.
We aren’t going to go into too much detail regarding specific illnesses as the 'Don’t Avoid' toolkit aggregates the majority of indicators into more generalised categories, although we will provide some links around the course to signpost you towards information on a range of illnesses and services. 
One in four people will experience a mental health problem each week. There are many things that may impact on our mental health, genetics, social economic status, conflicts, wars, loss of a loved one, stress at work or home, abuse, trauma, and much, much more. 
A key issue in tackling mental illness is that when you talk to people with poor mental health, they often express a profound feeling of self-shame.  We recognise this to be the weight of 'Stigma'. 
As we progress though the content you will develop a better understanding of stigma and how it affects those afflicted with mental illness and how it may hinder or impact on the identification of a mental illness. 
Many people, men, women, the young and old neither process nor express their emotions and feelings in such a way that they feel comfortable in asking for help; they simply try to deal with issues themselves. 
Raising an awareness through an actionable toolkit will hopefully remove the fear people have in supporting someone presenting an indicator of mental illness. And while identify indicators is crucial, the critical component of the support equation is that we are able to confidently action our concerns. 
We all have a brain that needs to be cared for, the same way we care for our physical self. If we cut ourselves, we clean the wound and apply a plaster.  Sometimes we may even need a few stitches to help the healing process; essentially, we care for it.  If we feel lonely, rejected, anxious, depressed, we tend to ignore it in the context of caring for it, and like a wound this may then get gradually worse. 
The Psychologist Guy Winch made this clear when he said, “we take more care of our teeth than we do our brains”. 
The point here is, establishing healthy habits early on makes it much easier to cope with whatever life brings. So as part of this training we will not only explore wellbeing but by the end of the training you will have an effective and actionable wellbeing plan.
Just as we come to the end of this lesson I am going to share a definition of mental health that comes from the World Health Organisation. 
“Mental health is defined as a state of wellbeing in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his own community.” (WHO 2011)
While statistically one in four people will experience mental health problems in their lifetime, I think now we can agree that everyone has mental health, so as I have already stated “this is an issue that concerns all of us.”
Remember, by signing up and participating in this training, you are already having a positive impact on mental health awareness.

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