From Mental Health to Behavioral Health …and back?

___ Know Thyself: Well-Being and Subjective Experience (Cerebrum): “Ancient Greek philosophers were fond of the aphorism, “know thyself,” inscribed above the entrance of one of the Temples of Apollo at Delphi. One expression of this tradition, variably attributed to Socrates and Plato, is that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Another, attributed to Aristotle, is “to know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” And, according to Socrates, the path to such self-knowledge is through inner reflection, or what we now call introspection. Thousands of years later, professions arose to help people know themselves better…(however) Behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, and pharmaceutical approaches have all traditionally assumed that successful treatment must go beyond, or beneath, subjective experience—that the way to improve mental health is to change problematic behavior or the information-processing functions and/or brain physiology underlying it. Reflecting this view, insurance companies today are more likely to refer to “behavioral health” than “mental health.” But perhaps this assumption, which equates the behavioral with the mental, needs to be reconsidered…the idea that the subjective experience of fear is a hard-wired state inherited from animals is not universally accepted by psychologists or neuroscientists. How, then, might fear come about if not via an ancient subcortical circuit? It seems worth considering the possibility that it arises the...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness behavioral Behavioral Health cognitive-behavioral conscious Consciousness Emotions introspection Mental-Health mind pharmaceutical self-knowledge subcortical subjective experience wisd Source Type: blogs