PHILOSOPHY
Before considering our services it is important to understand our approach to treatment. Below is a brief overview of the key concepts:
What is Mental Fitness?
Mental Fitness steps outside the binary of mental health and mental illness. Rather than viewing people as mentally healthy or mentally ill, from a mental fitness perspective, there are more or less effective ways of coping with life's challenges. The ways we cope with stress, grief, loss, and trauma are influenced by multiple factors, including our biology, social environment, and resources. The coping strategies we develop may be adaptive and effective for awhile, but become less so as our circumstances change. The time may come when we realize that how we are responding to the world is no longer working. But change is not easy. It requires recognizing and understanding our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. But more importantly, it requires a sense of dissonance between how things are and how we want them to be.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Viktor Frankl
​So what is mental illness? Psychiatric labels are useful for describing and organizing maladaptive emotional, cognitive, and behavioral patterns. However, these labels are limiting and incomplete; they do not, and cannot, capture the richness of human experience. They also create the impression that a person either has a disorder, or they don't, suggesting a false binary between health and illness, between "normal" and abnormal. This may be useful for statistics and certain kinds of research, but has little to do with healing and wellbeing.
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Another way to view thoughts, feelings, and behavior is through the lens of fitness. ​Fitness, whether physical or mental, is relative to our environment and our goals. Physical fitness for powerlifting is not the same as physical fitness for running a marathon. While they share basic foundational principles, the manifestation of these principles will be specific to the activity. Similarly, mental fitness is relative to our goals and environment. For example, the strategies we adopt in an abusive relationship will probably not be as effective in a healthy relationship. But feeling unable to cope with the world as it exists does not make us ill; it means that our current ways of coping are not a good fit. But this can change.
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Are diagnoses important? Yes and no. Sometimes they are required for billing and administrative purposes. Sometimes it can provide comfort to put a name to something, and to know that we are not alone in our experience. But diagnoses don't tell the whole story and don't offer guidance or reassurance. At best, they provide a list of symptoms that can help to focus treatment.
The goal of mental fitness is not to cure an illness. The goal is to develop thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are adaptive and effective, and to minimize those that are not. Ultimately, mental fitness is a recovery-oriented process, rather than a destination. Our environment is always changing, and so are we. Mental fitness is the process of adapting to these changes in a positive, self-affirming way.