romanticize this phd time

Something that I love about this time of my life, doing a PhD, is the time to sit and be thoughtful with my word choices.

To really be challenged to define what I mean and defend my choices.

In jobs where productivity can be tracked by billable hours and emails have to be replied to in a certain amount of time, it is a beautiful and meaningful experience to contemplate.

With others waiting on your discoveries and decisions.

Now this isn’t to say this is the only environment where this happens, or even that it happens for everyone in their PhD journeys. Just that I’m am enjoying the challenge of exploring, rejecting, playing with words.

Recently it’s been around mental health.

If mental health is impacted by diet, sleep, relationships, wages, racism, environment such as green spaces or blue spaces, what makes it a better term that wellbeing?

Does mental health imply located within one individual (i.g. your mind)?

Does that mean it does not include the body and somatics?

Does wellbeing speak to a more holistic understanding?

Are both terms used interchangeably?

Should they be used together always?

Can wellbeing speak to structural inequalities that impact folks emotions, energy levels, relationships that mental health often doesn’t? Or does it?

Do we need new words all together?

Is positive and negative mental health an unhelpful, or untrue, dichotomy?

Is mental health a stagnant measure or a moment by moment measure?

Is it worth creating new terms?

Is it worth fighting popular cultural adoptions of these phrases with academic definitions?

Who does that help?

Is coining a new term overdone?

A string of a million questions but I am interested in how we talk, or don’t talk about these things. And do we mean the same things when we enter into conversations on these topics? Sometimes I don’t think 80,000 words will bother me when I can write so much just about a single word choice lol What do you think about these terms - mental health and wellbeing?