Mental Health Barriers: Obstacles to Wellness

What Are the Mental Health Barriers?

Mental health barriers are those factors in lfe that prevent people from experiencing high degrees of wellbeing and overall wellness.

Some of these barriers are common across all human beings and others are culturally, socially or age specific.

Whilst some barriers are changeable, for example most of the mental health problems we are familiar with, others barriers are more difficult to tackle and might only be solved through acceptance and the development of better coping skills.

Different Types of Mental Health Barriers

Mental health barriers exist in six fundamentally different forms including:

• Psychological barriers
• Behavioural barriers
• Biological barriers
• Cognitive barriers
• Sociocultural barriers
• Physical barriers

You can read more about these different types of barriers below.

Psychological Barriers

Psychological mental health barriers include all of the emotional and behavioural problems that people experience that we know collectively as mental health problems.

They are psychological in nature because they are the result of the subjective meanings and interpretations that people attribute to their experiences.

Behavioural Barriers

Behavioural mental health barriers are the things that people do that negatively impact upon wellbeing.

For example, getting drunk in an attempt to forget the stresses endured during a hard day at work is a form of behaviour that might seem like a good idea, but in the long term may create more problems than it solves.

Almost all forms of avoidance or safety behaviours fit into this category.

Biological Barriers

Biological mental health barriers are those factors which are due to the physical biology of a person rather than any psychological components.

For example, there are a number of neurological factors (differences in neural architecture) or biological pathology that can inhibit wellbeing including such problems as brain tumours or lesions that impair normal functioning.

Some of these biological barriers are treatable with medicines or surgery whilst others may be more permanent and inhibiting in nature.

The medical modelling of psychological problems as biological pathology does not stand up to the rigourous application of scientific methodologies (it has both low scientific validity and low reliability) and are therefore excluded from this category.

Cognitive Barriers

Cognitive mental health barriers are those limitations that are imposed by the physical constraints associated with Cognitive functioning.

For example, it is known that the attentional resources that we are able to allocate to perform tasks has a finite capacity.

If we exceed this capacity then the quality of our attention drops and we may not be able to cope with the tasks as effectively as we might like to.

Research shows that if we try to perform too many tasks and run out of attention, that we can experience a phenomenon known as Cognitive Tunneling in which our performance is reduced.

So, if we are overwhelmed by trying to cope with too many problems at the same time, our ability to identify and make use of positive solutions can be seriously diminished because of cognitive tunneling.

Sociocultural Barriers

Sociocultural mental health barriers are those limiting factors that are imposed as a result of the social and cultural rules and regulations that any given society adheres to (cultural settings).

For example, it has traditionally been very difficult for females in the UK to be treated as equal to males in the most senior commercial roles (known as the glass ceiling).

This barrier is not, of course, anything to do with the person who is being limited by it, but is a barrier that has been supported by outdated and factually inaccurate stereotyping.

Many people may also find that ethnic and religious ideologies place limitations in the way of wellbeing.

Physical Barriers

Physical mental health barriers are those that are physical in nature and are therefore common for all humans.

For example, we cannot travel back in time, we cannot, with any degree of certainty, predict the future, we cannot bring dead people back to life and we cannot swim to Jupiter.

The only way to deal with unchangeable physical barriers that might inhibit mental wellbeing is to learn how to cope with them more effectively.