Rethinking Mental Health and Exploring a New Philosophy for Understanding Experience
- Brainz Magazine
- Jul 24
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 15
Lance Kair is a licensed professional counselor, founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, and published philosopher integrating trauma-informed care with existential and postmodern insights. He brings depth, compassion, and decades of lived experience to the evolving landscape of mental health.
Mental health is larger than what you think and feel. The new book by lance kair, Mental Health Philosophy, coming out in the next month, speaks to the mental health that you are, as the life you are living, and the things you do.
The grounding of sense
What if mental health isn’t something we define, but something that appears? What if what we sense is what has sense, is sensible, and makes sense, all the time?
This is one of the questions my new book, Mental Health Philosophy, ponders, inviting readers, experiencers, and practitioners of mental health into a quiet, radical rethinking of what we are involved with, not as a condition to be measured or resolved, but as a phenomenon that shows itself within experience.
I’ll repeat that: within experience.
When there is a problem of mental health, it is the subject of psychology, the mind is involved with the modern world. Because psychology is part of experience, beyond its definition and philosophical argument (oddly) drawing from phenomenological thought, we can explore how mental health emerges through presence, relationship, and context to exceed psychology, yet still be involved with it. No theory is needed (even as there will be use for them), no argument (even as argument is useful), because, as I will show in this book, this is already occurring as the experience, now a knowable thing, whenever we come across mental health, but particularly in the situation of therapy and counselors working with people.
What is the problem with mental health?
This is exactly the problem that psychology, and its kin, psychiatry and neurology, through the very activity of the scientific method (e.g., hypothesis, experimentation, observation, and theorization), promote as definition. A problem exists, and the answer to this existential problem is called theory on one hand, and phenomenology on the other; it is what some contemporary philosophers have called correlational. Let me say it again: what is the problem? It is an activity of addressing the problem. And here we have the modern repetition.
We can see evidence of this at work when we look around at the world, but specifically when we seek help for mental issues. But there is something different with the latter, even if we wish it to be just like every other problem. Psychology relies on just this: we are met with problems at every door, as though in every guise there is a common kind, whether it be problems of building a house, doing math, or curing mental issues. These problems return with the askance for help: “This is what it is, and this is what you need to do about it.” Yet, in mental health, like no other way of encountering problems and allowing for every kind of theory for intervention that is sensible (with a condition that the book gets into), that kind of approach itself is likewise questionable. If this is possible, then we have a way to understand mental health as a knowable thing, as we say in philosophy, in itself.
Yes, it is an odd sort of realization to note when we are in the middle of it because even as we might notice this, we are regularly and routinely drawn to seeing psychological activity as a problem. It is seemingly inescapable, and indeed, even as we try to escape it, we find ourselves drawn back into justifying the problem as part of existence, that something must be wrong somewhere, and must be solved.
A wind of truth against the sail of reality
Yet, for a true reckoning of mental health, as my book will discuss, there is no purpose in arguing against any psychological reality, argued, represented, or what have you, except for the maintenance of psychology. How does that sound for a philosophy? And isn’t this the problem that arises in nearly every mental issue that exists, at least from the standpoint of how we address it? Is the person’s experience self-contained and self-referential, what psychology calls phenomenological?
Where mental health takes precedence over any represented psychological manifestation, for some, this might sound confusing, if not scary. How could psychology even conceive, let alone admit, that its world is not all there is? We might also ponder the rebuttals and pushbacks and see them in a new, blazing light: an argument! We might just hear the whispers of a subconscious or a psyche turn into a very present voice, saying, “There MUST be a problem to fix!” For sure, who could argue with that? But then, isn’t that the problem? Kind of weird, huh? Somehow, we were trying to find a solution. Why would I (could I) pose that the problem is not a problem? So, it is very reasonable that there is nothing to say against the fact that we must have problems, for anything we could say would just be posing that what I am saying is not problematic.
How odd.
What could this book really be about?
Mental health. The thing that we are all talking about when we say ‘mental health’. We would not have any mental problems unless we had some reference to mental health; even if we say it’s psychological, or psychiatric, or neurological, without mental health, I am not sure what their purpose would be, let alone what it could be giving us if there wasn’t a mental health to either measure their results and theories by or work towards. Granted, we could say psychological health, but then we would necessarily be talking about psychological health and not mental health. And I am not sure how I could have a psyche unless there was a mind first. But if I were to argue one over the other, have I not then just posed a problem to be solved?
What is happening?
Mental Health Philosophy reflects on how all these frameworks participate in what becomes visible, but more precisely, knowable, and how therapeutic encounters remain shaped by, but not reducible to, the systems they move around and within. Whether disease, disorder, or issue, mental health philosophy describes how they are possible, what is happening psychologically, as well as why any intervention works that is, explainable to each their own meanings. It contextualizes everything that can be said to be involved with mental health and grounds all activity by a sensible and knowable epistemological reality that is, a knowable reality that is true because every other explanation, every subjective opinion, and every modern theory is accounted for by it. It verifies and validates real knowledge in a way that has not been accomplished for some time, all the while because it limits its explanatory domain to mental health only.
Sound Intriguing?
Written for those drawn to the deeper epistemological questions behind wellness, sickness, health, psychology, identity, and human experience, this is not a manual or a model, not an argument of proof, but an argument of validation.
My book Mental Health Philosophy is, indeed, coming to mind near you in 2025-2026!
Visit my website for more info!
Read more from Lance Allan Kair
Lance Allan Kair, Licensed Professional Counselor
Lance Kair is licensed professional counselor and founder of Agency Matters Mental Health, he blends trauma-informed therapy with deep philosophical insight drawn from thinkers like Zizek Badiou, and Kierkegaard. Formerly immersed in 1990s psychedelic and rave culture, his lived experience with addiction, grief, and harm reduction drives his radically compassionate care. He's the author of multiple philosophical works, including The Moment of Decisive Significance, and is a leading voice in the emerging field of Mental Health Philosophy.
