Mental health

[Tonnerre]

... is increasingly used to mean mental ill-health. It always makes me do a double take. It's obviously not something you can really pick people up on, so I thought I'd have a quick vent on here.

Makes me irrationally angry. Everyone has 'mental health', same as 'heart health', 'oral health' etc!

Yes, I'm with you. Surely everyone has mental health to some degree or other. The other that always makes me think twice is "he's on the spectrum" to which I always think (and indeed occasionally say) "surely we're all on the spectrum somewhere".

When people use "mental health" to mean mental illness or mental health difficulties, they are saying the opposite of what they mean. It undermines the discussion and hinders understanding.

Flippetydip
We are not all on the autism spectrum.

The spectrum is not a scale of severity of autistic impairment.

Everyone on the autism spectrum meets the diagnostic criteria for autism; the spectrum illustrates the different ways in which this manifests.

This has been annoying me for ages, although when I started a thread similar to this one on MN no one agreed with me. I don't know why they think it makes sense. No one ever refers to someone who has a physical illness by saying "He/she's got physical health" because it's obviously not true, yet "He/she's got mental health" is now frequently said and written to mean the opposite. Increasingly, people don't think about what the words they're saying actually mean (as with "would of" etc).

Ironoaks" but they never specify autistic spectrum. I do take your point though.