The term “mental health” is everywhere, from government agendas, to educational reforms, to daily discourse. This is for good reason—hundreds of millions of people suffer from significant mental health concerns with a diagnosable mental disorder, let alone the fact that nearly all individuals have struggled with their mental health. The importance of mental health is uncontroversial, but the same cannot be said about its nature. Every practice related to mental health—which involves some of the most vulnerable people in the world—is committed to a conceptualization of mental health regardless of whether that practice is cognizant of this fact. Therefore, it is imperative to develop better answers to the questions of “what is mental health and why?” because conceptualizations of mental health systematically guide research, intervention, policy, and even how individuals strive to live their lives. I argue that the answer to the question of “what is mental health?” is that mental health is a causal nexus of positive facts. That is, mental health is to be identified with a cluster of positive facts that regularly co-occur such as resilience, hedonistic mental states like joy, high cognitive functioning like concentration, and productivity. The answer to the question “why is mental health what it is?” is that the positive facts regularly appear together due to the causal relations between them, rather than arbitrarily. For instance, resilience causes high cognitive functioning, which in turn causes resilience, which causes productivity, which causes high cognitive functioning and joy, and so forth. This explains why mental health is what it is because the causal relations between positive facts “glue” them together, causing them to regularly co-occur, thereby making them a stable category of existence that factors into epistemic practices such as induction and prediction. However, given the state of our knowledge, further empirical evidence is needed to elucidate the exact positive facts that constitute the mental health causal nexus and thus answer what mental health is. I provide a novel methodology—the anchoring analysis—that involves studying the mechanisms of causal interactions between potential positive facts to determine which are the most causally important and thus should be considered constitutive facts of mental health. Elucidating the homeostatic mechanism of the kind mental health is a daunting task; however, we only complicate matters for ourselves if we simplify the complexity of mental health. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

(in English): The aim of the work is to reconstruct and interpret the method of historicized analysis and its employment to examine the phenomenon of "making up people". The concept is Hacking's description for the impact scientific classifications can have on classified people. The point of departure for the examination in the work is the thesis that historicized analysis employs the elements of philosophical conceptual analysis together with historical tools philosophy of science corroborates and whose strategies are often in opposition to the analytical tradition. As a follow-up of the main thesis the work also examines whether the historicized analysis can be understood as a history of the present. Moreover, it asks questions that come up in connection with the project of "making up people" such as: "What are the conditions for a scientific category to emerge? When categories emerge do new kinds of people emerge as well? What is the specific structure that enables the mutual interaction and effect scientific categories and classified people make? One of the aims will therefore be to elucidate to what extend the historicized analysis is able to answer those questions. Last but not least the work looks into the critical implications and usefulness of the method of historicized analysis.