Conversational notions of health, mental health and weel being

Abstract

This paper aimsto clarify whether the concepts of Health, Mental Health and Wellbeing overlap or if there should be a proper definition for each one of them. Taking advantage of previous studies with students from two Polytechnical Institutes, conversational notions were used to form a questionnaire around the three topics above. The cooccurrences in the responses of the 43 subjects indicate that the central concept is Wellbeing, and that Health differs from Mental Health because it is closer to positive and negative ways of coping.

Keywords

• health
• mental health
• wellbeing