'mental distance' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to describe the emotional and psychological gap between two people. For example, "After the argument, Sarah felt an immense mental distance between her and her partner."
Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover.
So might the mental "distance" between the drugs zeldox and zovirax and zephrex and zyprexa.
"Thinking about your enemies in subhuman categories is a way of creating a mental distance, of excluding them from the human family," he said.
I don't say an MA in gangsta rap or business studies will necessarily make you a rapist, but there's less mental distance to travel before you get there.
Frail but steely, she mocked them: an eye for the absurd, she said, helped to keep her mental distance from those "brutal, cold, murderous, contemptuous people".
He liked the English crews, it seemed, but more importantly he benefited from the physical distance between himself and his paymasters, the mental distance between himself and a set full of gorblimey limeys calling him "guv'nor".
Ultimately, the mob myth depends on psychological distance, a term coined by the New York University psychologist Yaacov Trope to describe the phenomenon of mental distancing that takes place when we separate ourselves from events, people, emotions, or concepts.
Mischel's research has repeatedly shown that, while some people are naturally better at cooling than others, both children and adults can learn mental distancing techniques to strengthen their self-control.
The reason I fear for the worst is that convenient mental hooks for comfortable mental distancing and willful ignorance just happen to be available in abundance for this particular calamity.
Bullets fly, cars explode, pedestrians squelch under the wheels of your truck, but it's so far away and filtered that it feels inconsequential – you're playing a morally loose career criminal, and the physical distance from the carnage you're causing reflects his own mental distancing.
The study tried to correlate the ultrasound findings with established metrics used in pre-intubation airway assessment, but for reasons of patient comfort and practicability, some metrics were not included, such as hyoid-mental distance.
