Three Sets of Causes and Remedies for Mental Health and Mental Disorder

What causes people to behave in a mentally healthy way, or not? We can divide influences into three sets: biology, learning, and situations/environment. For optimum functioning, we need to have a well-functioning nervous system, good habits of responding to situations, and a good environment furnishing us situations to respond to. These sets of influences do not stay separate, but influence one another. Favorable new learning can override some biological dispositions (as for example when people genetically disposed to anxiety learn anti-anxiety techniques); bad learned habits or dangerous environments can result in biological damage to the nervous system (as for example with brain damage from aggressive encounters or drug abuse). Importantly, one person’s learned habits become another person’s environment. People’s habits of criticism, jealousy, verbal or physical abuse, and threatened or actual abandonment, versus kindness, rational joint decision-making, and loyalty, create emotional climates that can be very toxic or very favorable to the mental health of the people they affect. The implication is that widespread learning of psychologically skillful patterns also favorably affects both environmental and biological influences.