Mental and Behavioral Health Terms
Mental health, emotions, behavior, coping, and psychiatric care. Browse definitions and meanings below.
What is mental health?
Mental health describes emotional, psychological and social wellbeing, and how a person copes with stress, relates to others and makes decisions. It is not the absence of difficulty. The term covers the whole range, from ordinary strain through to conditions that meet the criteria for a diagnosis.
The vocabulary here rewards precision, because several everyday words carry stricter clinical meanings. Depression names a syndrome as well as a mood, anxiety names a group of conditions as well as a feeling, and psychosis describes a break with shared reality rather than any severe distress.
Terms in this topic
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Short action is the design: it starts working quickly and clears before morning, which is also why it does little for staying asleep.
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Better known today for nerve pain, migraine and sleep than for depression, this older antidepressant acts on a wide range of receptors.
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A drug that is used to treat depression and may be given to treat anxiety, sleep disorders, and pain.
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What makes it therapy rather than a visit is the written goal, the trained handler and the record of whether it worked.
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A drug used to treat symptoms of anxiety, such as feelings of fear, dread, uneasiness, and muscle tightness, that may occur as a reaction to stress.
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Blood levels rise within a day yet mood shifts take weeks, a gap suggesting slower brain adaptation rather than a simple chemical top-up.
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A description of conduct that disregards other people's rights, and not, in clinical use, a word for being shy or private.
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A useful alarm system that has become a problem when it fires without a threat, or keeps firing after one has passed.
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An anxiolytic is a medication used to relieve anxiety symptoms, most familiarly a benzodiazepine that enhances a calming brain chemical's effect.
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A drug used to treat symptoms of anxiety, such as feelings of fear, dread, uneasiness, and muscle tightness, that may occur as a reaction to stress.
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Short term relief that teaches itself: stepping away eases the fear at once, and that immediate ease keeps the pattern running.
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The gap between a dose that sedates and one that stops breathing is narrow, which is why safer alternatives displaced this class.
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Changing what a person does by changing what happens around it, rather than by working out why the habit began.
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Emotions run hotter and settle more slowly, and because the triggers are usually other people, relationships carry most of the strain.
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Chosen as often for what it does not do, since weight gain and sexual side effects are less common than with serotonin antidepressants.
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Unlike a fast-acting sedative it does nothing useful in the moment, and its benefit appears only after steady daily use.
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A type of psychotherapy that helps patients change their behavior by changing the way they think and feel about certain things.
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One of the older SSRIs, distinguished within the class less by how well it works than by its effect on the heart's electrical timing.
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A type of psychotherapy that helps patients change their behavior by changing the way they think and feel about certain things.
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Paying people, in vouchers or prizes, for verified evidence of a target behavior, and among the best supported approaches in addiction care.