Guest Blog by Dean Johnson, Vice President - Community Relations, Seven Counties Services

“Oh Behave!” - Certainly one of Austin Power’s more famous lines. In case you don’t know Austin, he’s the swinging English bachelor created by comedian Mike Myers. If you’ve seen any of the movies, you can probably hear his inflection and picture his facial expression just at the thought of the words. You also know that “Oh Behave!” was his admonition to others to control their flirtations.


I recently participated in a round table discussion with other behavioral healthcare professionals, advocates, parents and consumers from our community. One of the parents, who has been active in advocacy for many years, asked a question that left most in the room looking to one another for the definitive answer: “What exactly is behavioral healthcare and why do we call it that?” She’d heard the term and references to it throughout the years, but even someone so deeply involved in the field wasn’t sure she knew exactly what to think of when she heard those words. She wasn’t – and isn’t – alone.

There seemed to be a general agreement that behavioral healthcare has two components: treatment of mental illnesses and treatment of addictions. Individually, the two components enjoy a fairly widespread, if superficial, understanding by John and Joan Q. Public. But the term coined to identify the two together - behavioral healthcare -is not widely understood. Ask 10 people on the street what it means and I’d bet you an instant lottery ticket that the majority wouldn’t even come close.

One of the consumers in attendance said she didn’t like the term. An individual active and successful in recovery, she said she thought the term conveys the idea that people can control these illnesses through their own determination: they just have to “behave.”

The word “behave” has its origin in 15th Century Middle English (probably one of Austin’s distant relatives). Merriam-Webster says its primary meanings are “to manage actions of oneself in a particular way” or “to conduct oneself in a proper manner.” The first definition might find a home in the recovery models of both the mental health and addictions fields. The second definition is a bit more open to interpretation.

The common understanding does imply a level of management and control that exceeds the comfort of many. So what do we mean? More importantly, what are we conveying to the public when we use the term “behavioral healthcare”? We know what Austin would say. What do you say?