A new assessment model of mental health

Abstract

Traditionally, mental health has been considered as a mental state with absence of mental illness symptoms. According to the Dual-Factor Model of Mental Health, mental health is a complete state, which includes the presence of a positive state of human capacities and functions as well as the absence of disease or infirmity. However, these models haven’t investigated the mechanism of action of the regulatory or intermediary factors behind individual’s current state of mental health. From this point, this article constructs a new assessment model of mental health: Neuro-Trait-State-Balance model (NTSB). The NTSB model considers three aspects as follows: (1) assessing the dominant performance (adaptive state) and implicit mechanism (adaptive trait) to clarify the present situation of mental health; (2) assessing the neural mechanism of the adaptive trait and analyzing the relationship between the characteristics of higher nervous activities and mental health to clarify the implicit mechanism; (3) assessing the degree of needs balance to know the variation trend of mental health state. In addition, it can indirectly improve the intervention strategies of mental health.