Psychologists Defined the 6 Elements of Mental Health. How Many Do You Have?

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Psychologists Defined the 6 Elements of Mental Health. How Many Do You Have?

Forget TikTok trends or Instagram advice, a new study asked dozens of actual experts what is actually important for good mental health.

EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL
Aug 31, 2026

Photo: Getty Images
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Trauma, anxiety, autism, ADHD, neurodivergent. Put just about any word related to mental health into a Google Trends search and you’ll see the same pattern: a relatively flat line up until about 2020 and then a steep climb thereafter.

It’s a bit of objective confirmation for a trend many people already noticed. The internet in general, and social media in particular, is increasingly overrun with talk of mental health. A quick spin around TikTok is enough to convince most people that Interest in psychological well-being has clearly never been higher. (Though if you want scientific confirmation, studies exist.)

Which makes one central fact about mental health all the more startling. Experts in the field had never even agreed on what good mental health looks like. At least until a new study took a stab at nailing down the key ingredients of psychological health.
Mental health is hard to pin down

We all know intuitively what it means to be physically healthy. You’re free of disease and pain and your body works as it should. Your heart pumps, your spleen spleens, and your muscles do whatever you ask them to do. But what does mental health look like?

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Sigmund Freud hinted at the problem when he claimed the goal of therapy is to turn “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” Suffering is part of life and people are wildly different. Where the line sits between normal variation and a problem worthy of concern is far from clear. Concepts like happiness are notoriously hard to pin down.

This complete lack of a well defined target has been a bit of an embarrassment for mental health professionals. So a group of 122 of them recently decided to do something about it.
How to get 122 academics to agree

The group included a variety of mental health experts, from psychologists and psychiatrists to public health researchers and even philosophers, from 26 mostly western countries. They came together with one goal: to use an established technique for finding consensus called the Delphi method to settle an important question once and for all. What are the essential ingredients for good mental health?

To come to an agreement, the leaders of the study first solicited suggestions of the essential components of mental health from their pool of experts. Then they had the group rate all these suggestions, review their peers’ comments, and then rate them again.

After several rounds of feedback and discussion, they landed on 19 requirements for good mental health that 75 percent of the group could agree on. Six of those reached an even higher standard—90 percent of the experts agreed they were key ingredients of good mental health.
A six-part recipe for good mental health

The components of mental health just about everyone agreed on were:

Meaning and purpose: Having clear goals, a sense of direction, and a larger aim in life and/or the feeling that what we do is worthwhile, rewarding, and valuable.
Life satisfaction: The degree to which a person positively evaluates the overall quality of their life as a whole (i.e., how much the person likes the life they lead).
Self-acceptance: Experiencing different aspects of oneself (e.g., one’s body, personality, thoughts, and feelings) in a positive, tolerant, receptive, or non-judgmental way; experiencing positive self-worth.
Connection: Involving a feeling of belonging, mutual caring, love, and closeness to friends, family, and loved ones.
Autonomy: The perception that we have ownership over our behavior and choices, and the ability to express oneself.
Happiness: States that are characterized by moderate-arousal pleasant feelings, such as feeling happy, cheerful, and pleased.

The remaining 13 elements that most of the experts thought were important were acceptance, achievement, activities and functioning (overall satisfaction with our activities and leisure), belonging, calmness, competence, development, engagement, fun, optimism, self-congruence (your actions and values line up), sense of safety, vitality.
Look, no cortisol cocktails!

What should we make of this list? The stated goal of the study, according to co-author Matthew Iasiello was to provide researchers and policy makers a shared framework for discussing mental health and designing policies to promote it.

“There is very little agreement on what we mean when we say mental wellbeing, flourishing, positive mental health, or related terms,” he commented. “These terms can all be used interchangeably, and each discipline defines them slightly differently, meaning that measures often focus on different things and evidence is hard to synthesize. This leads to confusion in the academic world, which also trickles into the ‘real world’ with governments and funders guessing about what to measure and where to invest.”

But given the endless discussion of mental health on social media these days, it strikes me that there is another takeaway for everyday people here too. Go online and you will be assaulted by gimmicky mental health advice, including everything from dubious ‘cortisol cocktails’ to amateurs offering to diagnose you (or your ex) with autism or narcissism. One recent investigation by the Guardian found that more than half of popular mental health content on TikTok contains misinformation.

These kind of claims are attention-grabbing—and therefore lucrative—for their creators. But if you look at the expert-verified ingredients of true mental health, they are as boring as they are important. It’s hard to go viral telling people to focus on self-acceptance and meaning. That’s the advice most of us actually need though.

So while the experts tweak their models, the rest of us can take one lesson from their research. If good mental health is your goal, focus on old fashioned fundamentals not dubious online trends.