ABSTRACT
Many people are very hostile to classifying normal grief as a mental malady. As far as possible, the authors should attempt to construct a unified account of health concepts, especially with respect to mental and physical health: i.e. the people should aim to construct health concepts which are applicable to both mental and physical conditions. Insofar as there is a workable distinction between (physical) injury and disease, though, it is dependent on certain properties of the causes of the relevant malady. The internal processes which cause other maladies will almost always be invisible and are therefore much more likely to be mysterious. The preceding exploration has gone some way towards establishing that “mental injury” is potentially a useful concept, that it is best understood by comparing it to the concept of physical injury, and the both mental and physical injury are best defined in terms of the “externality” of their immediate causes.
