Concept of Mind and Mental Health: A Utilitarian Approach

What exactly is the mind? It sounds like a simple question, but psychiatry has largely avoided answering it. For decades, clinicians focused on diagnosing and treating mental illness while leaving the nature of the mind itself undefined. Dr. M. Thirunavukarasu, Professor of Psychiatry at SRM Medical College, Chennai, challenged this avoidance head-on. In a landmark paper published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry, he proposed a structured, utilitarian framework for understanding the mind – and by extension, mental health – through the concept of Manas. His model is practical, culturally grounded, and offers a clear way to think about mental health beyond the binary of “sick” or “well.”

Why defining the mind matters 🔗

Before any meaningful conversation about mental health can happen, we need a working definition of the entity whose health we are talking about. This seems obvious, yet it has been one of psychiatry’s most stubborn blind spots. The World Health Organization itself acknowledges that mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders – it is a state of well-being in which individuals realize their own abilities, cope with normal stresses of life, and contribute to their communities. But to assess that well-being, we need to understand what the mind actually is.

Thirunavukarasu argued that the field’s reluctance to define the mind has left psychiatry functioning without a proper conceptual foundation. His solution was to introduce Manas – a term rooted in Indian philosophical tradition but given a precise scientific definition – as the biological entity whose health we call “mental health.”

Defining Manas: the core of mental health 🔗

Manas is not the brain, and it is not a metaphysical soul. It is a functional concept – the working mind as experienced by a living self. According to Thirunavukarasu’s framework, Manas is constituted by three components that are always present together and cannot be separated: mood, thought, and intellect.

The relationship between Manas and the body is also clearly defined. The body can exist without the Manas – just as the retina of the eye can exist without sight. But Manas cannot exist without the body. Without the Manas, there is no behaviour, and if the Manas is unaffected, a medical condition cannot be considered psychiatric.

Mood 🔗

Mood encompasses everything that is “felt” by the self. This goes well beyond what is clinically described as affect. It includes joy, sorrow, grief, jealousy, pity, fear, anger, and anxiety. Mood is the emotional coloring of every moment of conscious experience.

Thought 🔗

Thought is everything that is “thought” by the self – beliefs, faiths, ideas, and imagination. It represents the content of the mind as it runs narratives, holds convictions, and constructs meaning from experience.

Intellect 🔗

Intellect, in this model, is broader than what we typically call intelligence or higher-order thinking. It encompasses all computational processes of the self – receiving information from the environment and from within, processing it, and producing outputs. Even basic survival functions, such as sensing hunger and seeking food, are an expression of intellect.

The inseparability of the three components 🔗

The key insight in this model is that mood, thought, and intellect never operate in isolation. A change in any one component produces corresponding changes in the others. Thirunavukarasu uses a vivid illustration: a polished steel wheel spinning fast appears to show two or three distinct colors. Those colors are identifiable separately, but you cannot extract one without stopping the entire wheel. Similarly, mood, thought, and intellect are always present together in the Manas – identifiable, but not separable.

Consider receiving news of a job promotion. You feel elated (mood), start imagining how your life might change (thought), and begin planning next steps – who to tell, what to do (intellect). Now consider the opposite – receiving news of a serious diagnosis. You feel dread (mood), replay worst-case scenarios (thought), and begin calculating what resources and options are available (intellect). In both cases, all three components respond together, synchronously and congruently. When this synchrony is disrupted, the Manas has been adversely affected – and this disruption is the signal of abnormality in mental functioning.

The two-dimensional spectrum model of mental health 🔗

Once Manas is defined, Thirunavukarasu turns to the question: what does it mean for Manas to be “healthy”? Rather than a simple healthy-versus-ill binary, he proposes a two-dimensional spectrum model that measures mental health by its impact along two axes: impact on the self and impact on others.

This approach is called “utilitarian” because it evaluates mental states by their consequences – for the individual and for society. As described in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, this two-dimensional assessment produces four distinct mental health states.

Mentally healthy 🔗

When a person’s mental functioning has the least negative impact on both self and others, they are considered mentally healthy. This is the optimal state – not a perfect or idealized condition, but one in which mood, thought, and intellect function in harmony and benefit the individual and those around them.

Mentally not healthy 🔗

This state is characterized by an intermediate to high negative impact on the self, but least to intermediate impact on others. Examples include conditions like alcoholism, drug abuse, deliberate self-harm, and phobia. The person is experiencing significant internal distress or self-damaging behavior, but the direct harm to others remains limited.

Mentally unhealthy 🔗

Here, the primary concern shifts to impact on others. There may be variable impact on the self, but the impact on others is moderate to high. Personality disorders are cited as examples – conditions where the person’s patterns of thinking and behavior significantly disrupt social relationships and functioning.

Mental illness 🔗

Mental illness, in this model, is characterized by maximum impact on the self, with variable impact on others. Conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder fall into this category – states in which the functioning of the Manas itself is severely disrupted, producing significant personal suffering and disability.

This framework is clinically useful precisely because it avoids reducing every mental health concern to a binary diagnosis. It recognizes a spectrum – from health to not-healthy to unhealthy to illness – rather than drawing a sharp line between the “sane” and the “insane.” The Rosenhan experiment of 1973, in which eight mentally healthy individuals were admitted to psychiatric hospitals after feigning a single symptom and were all diagnosed with schizophrenia, demonstrated exactly why such rigid binary thinking can fail. Thirunavukarasu’s spectrum model offers a more nuanced alternative.

Criteria for mental health 🔗

Beyond categorizing states of mental functioning, Thirunavukarasu provides specific criteria for what it means to be mentally healthy. Mental health is defined as the fulfillment of three characteristics:

Awareness of one’s own self 🔗

The first criterion is self-awareness – recognizing that the self is not simply an isolated individual but is part of a common human experience. This is not a purely philosophical idea. In practical terms, self-awareness means being able to observe one’s own mood, thought, and intellectual processes without being entirely at their mercy. It is the foundation from which healthy behavior and decision-making emerge.

Ability to relate well with others 🔗

The second criterion is the capacity for healthy relationships. Mental health is not a purely internal state – it is expressed and tested in how a person engages with the people around them. The ability to form, maintain, and navigate relationships is both a marker and a product of mental well-being. Research consistently shows that social connection is one of the most robust protective factors for mental health across cultures and demographics.

Actions beneficial to self and others 🔗

The third criterion is that one’s deeds and activities are useful to oneself as well as to others – or at the very least, not detrimental to either. This is the utilitarian core of the model. Mental health is not only a private, internal state but a relational and social one. A person whose actions contribute positively – or at minimum, cause no harm – to both themselves and those around them meets this standard of mental health.

Taken together, these three criteria shift mental health assessment away from a purely symptom-based approach and toward a holistic evaluation of how a person lives, relates, and acts in the world. This aligns with the broader direction of mental health science: the WHO emphasizes that mental health is an integral part of overall health, determined by a range of socioeconomic, biological, and environmental factors – and that it cannot be separated from physical health and behavior.

Why this model matters 🔗

What makes the Manas framework particularly valuable is that it gives clinicians, educators, and individuals a clear, shared language for talking about mental health. Instead of defaulting to diagnostic labels, it asks: How is this person’s mood, thought, and intellect functioning in concert? What is the impact on themselves? What is the impact on others? Are they self-aware, relationally capable, and acting in ways that benefit the world around them?

These questions are applicable across cultures and contexts. Scholars in comparative mental health have noted that the Manas model draws on Indian philosophical traditions – where the concept of Manas appears in Hinduism and Buddhism as referring to an entity that bridges the body and the mind – and brings them into alignment with contemporary psychiatric thinking. This is not just academically interesting; it has practical significance for making mental health concepts accessible to populations where Western clinical frameworks may feel foreign or stigmatizing.

It is also worth noting the model’s limitations. Large-scale epidemiological studies are still needed to validate how well these four categories contain all known psychiatric conditions, and how reliably clinicians can apply them across different settings. But as a framework for teaching and for shifting the mental health conversation away from illness-centered thinking, it represents a meaningful contribution.

What do you think? If mental health is defined not just by the absence of illness but by how well your mood, thought, and intellect work together – and by how your actions affect both yourself and others – how would you assess your own mental health right now? And does framing mental health as something with social consequences, not just personal ones, change how you think about seeking support or making lifestyle changes?

References

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3136034/
2. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/major-themes/health-and-well-being
3. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0020764011422006
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51505473_A_utilitarian_concept_of_manas_and_mental_health
5. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10911315/
6. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8988192/