Editor’s Letter and TOC – Minnesota Women’s Press

Lydia Moran

As we continue to advance conversations and awareness around “mental health,” there is a danger of watering down the term without a clear understanding of what it really means. So I want to start by sharing how I conceptualized this issue’s theme, and how I believe the stories that emerged serve to create new understandings.

The Minnesota Department of Health offers a distinction between mental health and mental illness, which are not opposite. It is possible to have poor mental health and no mental illness, which is defined as “languishing,” e.g., “socially isolated, feeling disempowered, no sense of purpose, unemployment, high stressors [including] poor housing and poverty.” It is also possible to have a mental illness and good mental health, meaning one’s symptoms are properly managed, and one has a “strong support system, life satisfaction and purpose, home, employment, sense of empowerment, and positive identity.”

This is to say that it is important to acknowledge how mental health is inextricable from our environments and life circumstances, which are made up of socially and politically created conditions. In this issue, Dr. Catherine Squires and Dr. Taiyon Coleman do this by sharing their experiences of being sidelined throughout their careers in academia in a process of “racial weathering,” leading to deteriorated mental and physical health.

Amy Gage reports on how a chronic health condition — one that mostly affects women and is, not surprisingly, underfunded in the world of scientific research — can make people feel powerless and isolated.

Existing mental illness can also be exacerbated by the inability to get care, which is happening now in our state, particularly with youth in crisis. Mikki Morrissette reports, “With limited places to go, youth are stuck in emergency rooms, juvenile detention centers, and county facilities — or sent out of state.”