Mental Illness as Deviation from Natural Processes

The more clearly we can specify aspects of health, the more clearly we can describe illnesses in their deviations from our view of healthy processes. Where do we place the boundaries between health and illness? How do we decide what makes a boundary between health and illness? In a health-centered approach, we tend to concentrate more on elements of process--both healthy and pathological--than on signs and symptoms of health and sickness. From a pathology-centered approach, we consider any suspiciousness a possible sign of paranoia and then evaluate how severe that piece of paranoia is. From a health-centered focus, we consider suspiciousness a healthy, functional, self-protective watchfulness, possibly appropriate for the circumstances of that person and not necessarily a sign of paranoia, even if intense. We recognize sadness as a useful emotion, not as a piece of depression. We consider a rush of ideas to be a manifestation of excitement, enthusiasm, or interest, rather than a sign of hypomania. Thus the currently commonplace attempts to cure rapid or slow thinking, excitement, grief, anger, loneliness, fear, sadness, guilt, shame, and other discomfiting but useful healthy responses become recognizably improper.
This is not so much a difference among schools of thought as it is a difference in ways of using the knowledge within each school. Health, no longer considered the reduced presence of noticeable elements of pathology, comes to be seen as the existence of functional utility of the endowed mental processes. In the past, most professionals aimed to rid patients of what those professionals regarded as pathologies, rather than aiming to enhance their processes of health. Their view has been that the absence of noticeable pathognomonic symptom aspects of pathologies is what confirms health.
We could define psychological health in a more complex but more useful way as the functional utility of many natural useful processes of mind that serve to guide lives and enable people to be and do what they want to be and do, in ways that are not harmful to themselves and others. Actuating this view will take many years, but will finally define an ideal of mental health based on use of function rather than absence of dysfunction. That may finally eliminate the preposterous attempts to cure people of elements of their health.
The failure to work from a basis of health is part of the reason we have therapies aiming to cure natural healthy reactions, as if they were illnesses. They mistakenly treat as pathology such natural and useful (although unpleasant) feelings or states as grief, loneliness, anger, sadness, shame and guilt. They seek to cure such natural and useful (even if unpleasant) conditions as perceived low self-esteem, inferiority, superiority, inadequacy, passivity, and shyness. None of these conditions ordinarily calls for interferences with the natural processes that are occurring in them. Attempts to cure health frequently risk transforming health into long-term illness. It can waste lives, as exemplified in the account in the previous article of a patient suffering from tension phobia. I know of many such instances.