ABSTRACT
Thus, we see ‘health’ as a process, which has positive as well as negative aspects, such as good or bad health. Interestingly, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary includes the spiritual and moral along with the mental aspects of health, first noted in the seventeenth century (1611), whereas health activity, healing and cure were so defined almost a century earlier (1555), and a little later (1596) as making positive comment or regard, wishing a person ‘good health’. Despite Descartes (1596-1650) separating out ‘body’ and ‘mind’, as he radically distinguished the mind as indubitable, ‘I think therefore I am’, and explained the body on the basis of mechanistic principles, nonetheless health was seen to have both corporal and mental aspects, as well as the ‘spiritual’. This goes back to the Greeks, as they saw health as positive in both mind and body, and this integrative notion of health is a crucial basis for all mental health social work, as for general medicine.
