Mental Health Terminologies and Language

Flashcards about mental health terminologies and appropriate language usage.

Mental Health

A state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realise their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their communities.

Mental Health

An integral component of health and well-being and is more than the absence of mental disorders.

Social and Emotional Wellbeing

A holistic concept that results from a network of relationships between individuals, family, kin, and community, also recognises the importance of connection to land, culture, spirituality and ancestry.

Mental Disorder

A syndrome characterised by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behaviour that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes that underlie mental and behavioural functioning.

Mental Illness

The most commonly used term to describe conditions diagnosed by a medical professional that significantly affect how a person thinks, feels and interacts with other people.

Mental Health Condition

A broad term covering mental disorders and psychosocial disabilities. It also covers other mental states associated with significant distress, impairment in functioning, or risk of self-harm

Psychosocial Disability

A disability that arises when someone with a long-term mental impairment interacts with various barriers that may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. Barriers include discrimination, stigma and exclusion.

Consumer

Used to describe a person who identifies as having a lived experience of a mental health condition.

Lived Experience

Refers to the firsthand experience of an individual who has either currently or in the past experienced mental illness or mental health challenges.

Lived Experience Workforce

Workers who have unique knowledge, abilities and attributes. They draw on their own life-changing experience, service use, and journey of recovery and healing to support others; sometimes referred to as Peer support workers.

Personal Lived Experience

Having a personal experience of mental health challenges, service use, periods of healing/personal recovery.

Family/carer role

Involves the experience of supporting someone through mental health challenges, service use, and periods of healing/ personal recovery.