What the heck is Mental Health Coaching pt 2: Can we please come up with a better name?
Can we please come up with a better name than “Mental Health” Coach?
I have a confession to make. As much as I love the practice of mental health coaching, I’ve stopped using the phrase “mental health” in my coaching spaces.
Not because it’s wrong. But because it feels like the phrase “mental health” is stuck in last century. Stigma. Pathology. Illness. Abnormality. Nature-nurture binaries. Expert-driven “solutions”. Diagnose, cut it out, medicate, hospitalise, institutionalise. Years-long therapies.
Before we go any further with this discussion, I’d like to say that labels, diagnosis, and treatment from within a mental health framework can be important, affirming and life-saving. This isn’t about one vs the other, it can be an and … and.
I know this because I have lived experience of receiving a “mental health” diagnosis of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in my late teens. Getting that diagnosis from my clinical psychologist gave me a name and a way to make sense of the experience I was having. It was affirming because it said to me, the hurt that you’ve experienced is real and has had a real impact on your life. It helped soften the shame I was holding, both about what had happened to me, and about my reaction to what had happened.
But there was another side, too. For a while, that diagnosis became part of my identity. It became the reason I wasn’t functioning and became a reason I shouldn’t have to function. I saw my therapist as the expert in explaining myself to me. After years of therapy, when I told her that I wanted to terminate therapy, she told me I wasn’t ready. And I stayed.
I wish someone had explained post-traumatic healing to nineteen-year-old me. Had explained that, it is normal to have a big reaction to very upsetting experiences. That it is normal to have both physiological and emotional responses as our bodies and minds try to protect us from danger. And that, with time and support and meaning-making, it is normal to recover and even grow from challenging experiences.
Words have power. They shape the way we think about ourselves and what we hold as possible for ourselves.
“Mental health” is clinical. It says, there is a problem here that separates me from being “normal”. It whispers, “What’s wrong with me?”.
A mental health diagnosis can only be conferred by an expert. We “get diagnosed” – defined by an expert outside of ourselves, quantifying our deviation from “normal”.
It points to symptoms, struggle, and fighting for survival.
Discovering and working with a coaching approach has been healing. Normalising struggle and growth. Normalising the difficulties of life, and the recovery, healing and even flourishing that often follows. Knowing that having difficult thoughts and feelings doesn’t separate me from the rest of humanity, it connects me to universal human experiences. Grief. Loss. Heartbreak. Worry. Hopelessness. Shame. Uncertainty. These are just as universal human experiences as love, lust, joy, pride, and hope.
We are all whole. Even when we feel fractured. Even when grief, pain, worry, and struggle sit heavy in our chest.
In my coaching, I gravitate toward the phrase emotional wellbeing.
Because wellbeing asks:
· What’s important right now?
· What helps me feel grounded, connected, alive?
· What does thriving look like in this season in my life?
When we shift the language, we shift the lens.
· From pathology to possibility.
· From diagnosis to dignity.
· From “What’s wrong with me?” to “What’s ready to be reclaimed?”
Emotional wellbeing isn’t about constant joy or perfect balance. It’s not about erasing pain or bypassing struggle. It’s about honouring the full emotional landscape – grief, joy, uncertainty, clarity – and learning to move through it with intention. Softening toward shame. Dropping the urge to apologise.
It’s about trusting that resilience lives in us, even when we forget.
What words resonate with you?
