Illness of the Mind

Illness of the Mind
Psychopathology concerns itself with illness of the mind. This is vast subject that has received discussion from philosophers, theologians, administrators and lawyers as well as from physicians. Doctors who spend most of their working time straddled between health and illness rarely ask this question and even less frequently attempt to answer it.

World Health Organization definition of health states ‘health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’ If total well being is required perhaps virtually all of us are excluded.

Illness may be thought of in physical term that mental diseases are disease of the brain. Although this statement reasonably fits the organic psychiatric and can be broadened to encompass learning disability (mental retardation), one is less comfortable trying to include psychotic and neurotic disorders, and personality disorders just do not fit at all.
Similarly disease may be described in terms of what doctors treat. In defining this, researcher states ‘the diagnosis of patienthood has as its sufficient and necessary condition the experience of therapeutic concern by a person or himself and/or the arousal of therapeutic concern for him in his social environment’. Mental illness becomes, then, a term to describe the symptoms and condition of those people who are referred to a psychiatrist.
Illness of the Mind