Redefining mental health with Vanessa Pott
Monday, 18 May 2026
Mental health isn't the absence of mental illness. It's also not the presence of happiness, or resilience, or any of the other words we use to describe the ideal state that mostly doesn't exist.
Vanessa Pott has been thinking about this for years. What we mean when we say "mental health." What we're actually measuring when we measure it. And why the definition matters more than people realize.
Here's the problem: we define mental health negatively. As "not depressed" or "not anxious" or "not experiencing psychosis." It's like defining physical health as "not sick." Which is true, but incomplete.
What Vanessa talks about is mental health as actual capacity. The ability to navigate your life — not as it's supposed to be, but as it actually is. With your actual resources, your actual constraints, your actual reality.
For someone living with depression, mental health might look like: getting out of bed, making one phone call, eating something. That's success. That's health. That's the capacity you have, deployed well.
For someone with PTSD, it might look like: managing flashbacks without dissociating, staying present in one conversation, asking for what you need.
None of this would fit on a standard mental health screening. All of it is actually real, hard-won health.
The reframing that Vanessa does — and that needs to happen everywhere in mental health — is: stop measuring people against a theoretical ideal. Start measuring whether they're functioning within their actual life. Whether their capacity is growing. Whether they have agency.
This matters because the current model keeps telling people they're failing. "You should be happier." "You should be able to handle this." "Other people don't need this much support." When actually, the question should be: given what you're managing, what does health look like for you?
Once you ask that question, everything changes. Treatment changes. Recovery metrics change. What counts as success changes.
Vanessa is doing that work. And the mental health space needs it.
Listen to the full conversation: Redefining mental health with Vanessa Pott on Chronically.