The Mental Health Continuum “Taking a stance of curiosity as a Youth MHFAider is key to the role. Curiosity helps to build the whole picture of the young person and opens up lines of compassionate communication.” Alice, Youth MHFAider The Mental Health Continuum is a tool for understanding that the mental health of young people is fluid and changes over time. In the past, some have described the state of mental health as being a continuum, with being mentally healthy at one end and experiencing poor mental health at the other. This is less favoured now as it did not allow young people who have a diagnosable mental health condition (e.g. bipolar disorder) and are coping well with the condition (good coping strategies, good medication regime, supportive teachers, family, or friends, etc.) to be seen to have positive mental health. Now the favoured approach is to talk about two continua on different axes. On any given day young people around us exist somewhere on a scale that ranges from ‘maximum wellbeing’ to ‘minimum wellbeing’, and they will move up and down this scale. This forms the vertical axis. The horizontal axis ranges from having no formal diagnosis of a mental health condition to having a diagnosis. The Mental Health Continuum quadrants When these two ways of thinking are combined into the Mental Health Continuum model it creates four quadrants which young people can move around. They will continue to move between quadrants throughout their time as a young person and beyond into adulthood.
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