Healthy students as adult citizens (mental health of the Finnish student. Follow-up, report V).

The longitudinal research project dealing with the mental health of Finnish students was started in the year 1965. This paper is the fifth follow-up report from research phase III. It describes the most healthy subgroup by contrasting it with the ill subgroup. Time and sex as well as external and internal reality are essential aspects of this comparison between the healthy and the ill. Differences between the healthy and the ill have been described in terms of a) external facts, b) background information (phases I and II) and c) subjective inner feelings. The special character of mental health and illness in men and women is also discussed from several points of view. In the attempt to interpret the extensive body of data and to give it a coherent shape, one general hypothesis which has been formed is that women tend to be characterized by a greater 'mobility' between the more mature, adult level and an earlier one, reaching back all the way to the oral aspects of the dyadic relationship. Such mobility and flexibility has both its advantages and its disadvantages. The specific aspects of women's difficulties are easily obscured by the duality of the roles taken on by the woman, and the great difference between them - that of adult woman and that of mother. In particular the maternal role easily comes to mask problematic early elements, which under subsequent conditions of stress may be activated. The male personality is more definite and clearcut in this respect, but by the same token also more rigid.