Overview

Mental health is a level of psychological well-being, or an absence of mental disorder; it is the psychological state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment . From the perspective of positive psychology or holism, mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life, and create a balance between life activities and efforts to achieve psychological resilience. According to world health organization (WHO) mental health includes subjective well-being, perceived selfefficacy, autonomy, competence, intergenerational dependence, and self-actualization of one's intellectual and emotional potential, among others. WHO further states that the wellbeing of an individual is encompassed in the realization of their abilities, coping with normal stresses of life, productive work and contribution to their community. However, cultural differences, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories all affect how mental health is defined. According to a new multinational study, suicidal thoughts and behavior are linked to a range of mental conditions. Although depression is one of the strongest predictors of suicidal thoughts, disorders such as anxiety and poor impulse control apparently trigger people to act on such thoughts - especially in developing countries. Using data from over 100,000 individuals in 21 countries participating in the WHO World Mental Health Surveys, Matthew Nock (Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) and colleagues investigated which mental health disorders increase the odds of experiencing suicidal thoughts and actual suicide attempts, and how these relationships differ across developed and developing countries. The researchers collected and analyzed data on the lifetime presence and age of onset of mental disorders and of nonfatal suicidal behaviors using structured interviews. While mental disorders are among the strongest known predictors of suicide, the multi-country study was initiated because people often have more than one mental disorder at a time and little is known about which disorders are uniquely predictive of suicidal behavior, the extent to which disorders predict suicide attempts beyond their association with suicidal thoughts, and whether these associations are similar across developed and developing countries. The research found that mental disorders are present in approximately half of people who seriously consider killing themselves and two thirds of those who make a suicide attempt. Overall, mental disorders were equally predictive of suicidal thoughts and attempts in developed and developing countries, with a key difference being that the strongest,

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