Mental Health Promotion, Psychiatry and Related Fields

Abstract

Rational fields are groupings of related goals and behaviours. They have varying degrees of stability. Psychiatry and mental health promotion are disintegrating rational fields because they have vague goals, exhibit multiple oversimplifications and overcomplications of meaning, and disregard the ‘beyond the evidence decision points’ that created and sustain them. Consequently, psychiatry and mental health promotion should be subsumed within a broad, explicitly health promoting field, governed by the understanding that promoting a person's health means promoting the autonomy of an integrated social being. Were this to be the case there would be no need for a discipline called ‘mental health promotion’, and psychiatric practice would change radically.