ABSTRACT
Taylor and Field suggest that we all think we know what mental health is but that actually it is very difficult to clearly define. 1 Mental health can be defined negatively, as the absence of disease, or functionally as what a person is able to do, and in attempts to define mental health commentators frequently wrestle with the presence or absence of the features versus functionality debate. It is perhaps significant, then, that although in their ‘Health of the Nation ’ document 2 the UK government set a target to ‘improve significantly the health and social functioning of mentally ill people ’ there was no attempt to define what mental illness actually was.
