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A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness, a mental health condition, or a psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. A mental disorder is also characterized by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotional regulation, or behavior, often in a social context. Such disturbances may occur as single episodes, may be persistent, or may be relapsing–remitting. There are many different types of mental disorders, with signs and symptoms that vary widely between specific disorders. A mental disorder is one aspect of mental health.
Anti-psychiatry, sometimes spelled antipsychiatry without the hyphen, is a movement based on the view that psychiatric treatment is often more damaging than helpful to patients, highlighting controversies about psychiatry. Objections include the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis, the questionable effectiveness and harm associated with psychiatric medications, the failure of psychiatry to demonstrate any disease treatment mechanism for psychiatric medication effects, and legal concerns about equal human rights and civil freedom being nullified by the presence of diagnosis. Historical critiques of psychiatry came to light after focus on the extreme harms associated with electroconvulsive therapy or insulin shock therapy. The term "anti-psychiatry" is in dispute and often used to dismiss all critics of psychiatry, many of whom agree that a specialized role of helper for people in emotional distress may at times be appropriate, and allow for individual choice around treatment decisions.
A mental disorder is an impairment of the mind disrupting normal thinking, feeling, mood, behavior, or social interactions, and accompanied by significant distress or dysfunction. The causes of mental disorders are very complex and vary depending on the particular disorder and the individual. Although the causes of most mental disorders are not fully understood, researchers have identified a variety of biological, psychological, and environmental factors that can contribute to the development or progression of mental disorders. Most mental disorders result in a combination of several different factors rather than just a single factor.
A psychiatric or psychotropic medication is a psychoactive drug taken to exert an effect on the chemical makeup of the brain and nervous system. Thus, these medications are used to treat mental illnesses. These medications are typically made of synthetic chemical compounds and are usually prescribed in psychiatric settings, potentially involuntarily during commitment. Since the mid-20th century, such medications have been leading treatments for a broad range of mental disorders and have decreased the need for long-term hospitalization, thereby lowering the cost of mental health care. The recidivism or rehospitalization of the mentally ill is at a high rate in many countries, and the reasons for the relapses are under research.
Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism.
The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in which the author criticizes psychiatry and argues against the concept of mental illness. It received much publicity, and has become a classic, well known as an argument that "mentally ill" is a label which psychiatrists have used against people "disabled by living" rather than truly having a disease.
Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people's feelings. Narcissistic personality disorder is one of the sub-types of the broader category known as personality disorders. It is often comorbid with other mental disorders and associated with significant functional impairment and psychosocial disability.
In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness. Self-awareness is how an individual experiences and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires.
Anosognosia is a condition in which a person with a disability is cognitively unaware of having it due to an underlying physical condition. Anosognosia results from physiological damage to brain structures, typically to the parietal lobe or a diffuse lesion on the fronto-temporal-parietal area in the right hemisphere, and is thus a neuropsychiatric disorder. A deficit of self-awareness, the term was first coined by the neurologist Joseph Babinski in 1914, in order to describe the unawareness of hemiplegia.
Ganser syndrome is a rare dissociative disorder characterized by nonsensical or wrong answers to questions and other dissociative symptoms such as fugue, amnesia or conversion disorder, often with visual pseudohallucinations and a decreased state of consciousness. The syndrome has also been called nonsense syndrome, balderdash syndrome, syndrome of approximate answers, hysterical pseudodementia or prison psychosis.
The mental status examination (MSE) is an important part of the clinical assessment process in neurological and psychiatric practice. It is a structured way of observing and describing a patient's psychological functioning at a given point in time, under the domains of appearance, attitude, behavior, mood and affect, speech, thought process, thought content, perception, cognition, insight, and judgment. There are some minor variations in the subdivision of the MSE and the sequence and names of MSE domains.
Orientation is a function of the mind involving awareness of three dimensions: time, place and person. Problems with orientation lead to disorientation, and can be due to various conditions. It ranges from an inability to coherently understand person, place, time, and situation, to complete orientation.
Biological psychiatry or biopsychiatry is an approach to psychiatry that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of the biological function of the nervous system. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and draws on sciences such as neuroscience, psychopharmacology, biochemistry, genetics, epigenetics and physiology to investigate the biological bases of behavior and psychopathology. Biopsychiatry is the branch of medicine which deals with the study of the biological function of the nervous system in mental disorders.
Emergency psychiatry is the clinical application of psychiatry in emergency settings. Conditions requiring psychiatric interventions may include attempted suicide, substance abuse, depression, psychosis, violence or other rapid changes in behavior.
Medical model is the term coined by psychiatrist R. D. Laing in his The Politics of the Family and Other Essays (1971), for the "set of procedures in which all doctors are trained". It includes complaint, history, physical examination, ancillary tests if needed, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis with and without treatment.
Classified as a "conversion disorder" by the DSM-IV, a psychogenic disease is a condition in which mental stressors cause physical symptoms matching other disorders. The manifestation of physical symptoms without biologically identifiable cause results from disruptions in normal brain function due to psychological stress. During a psychogenic episode, neuroimaging has shown that neural circuits affecting functions such as emotion, executive functioning, perception, movement, and volition are inhibited. These disruptions become strong enough to prevent the brain from voluntarily allowing certain actions. When the brain is unable to signal to the body to perform an action voluntarily, physical symptoms of a disorder arise. Examples of diseases that are deemed to be psychogenic in origin include psychogenic seizures, psychogenic polydipsia, psychogenic tremor, and psychogenic pain.
Anosodiaphoria is a condition in which a person who has a brain injury seems indifferent to the existence of their impairment. Anosodiaphoria is specifically used in association with indifference to paralysis. It is a somatosensory agnosia, or a sign of neglect syndrome. It might be specifically associated with defective functioning of the frontal lobe of the right hemisphere.
Elyn R. Saks is associate dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has written about her experience with the illness in her award-winning best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold, published by Hyperion Books in 2007. She is also a cancer survivor.
Narcissistic defenses are those processes whereby the idealized aspects of the self are preserved, and its limitations denied. They tend to be rigid and totalistic. They are often driven by feelings of shame and guilt, conscious or unconscious.
Asomatognosia is a neurological disorder characterized as loss of recognition or awareness of part of the body. The failure to acknowledge, for example, a limb, may be expressed verbally or as a pattern of neglect. The limb may also be attributed to another person, a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia. However, they can be shown their limb and this error is temporarily corrected. Some authors have focused on the prevalence of hemispatial neglect in such patients.
References
- 1 2 Novella, Steven (24 January 2018). "Mental Illness Denial". ScienceBasedMedicine.org. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
- ↑ "'Depression' Is a Symptom, Not a Disorder". opmed.doximity.com. Retrieved 2021-12-13.
- 1 2 Escalante, Alison. "Researchers Doubt That Certain Mental Disorders Are Disorders At All". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-12-13.
- 1 2 Marková, Ivana (2005). Insight in psychiatry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-511-14045-2. OCLC 63814379.
- 1 2 Moro, Valentina; Pernigo, Simone; Zapparoli, Paola; Cordioli, Zeno; Aglioti, Salvatore M. (2011). "Phenomenology and neural correlates of implicit and emergent motor awareness in patients with anosognosia for hemiplegia". Behavioural Brain Research. 225 (1): 259–269. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.07.010. PMID 21777624. S2CID 8389272.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Saks, Elyn R. "Some thoughts on denial of mental illness." American Journal of Psychiatry 166.9 (2009): 972-973. Web. 11 Dec. 2021
- ↑ Paris, Joel (2020). Overdiagnosis in psychiatry how modern psychiatry lost its way while creating a diagnosis for almost all of life's misfortunes (Second ed.). New York, NY. ISBN 978-0-19-750430-7. OCLC 1147940363.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ↑ Benning, Tony (2016). "No such thing as mental illness? Critical reflections on the major ideas and legacy of Thomas Szasz". BJPsych Bulletin. 40 (6): 292–295. doi:10.1192/pb.bp.115.053249. PMC 5353517 . PMID 28377805.
- ↑ Carey, Benedict (11 September 2012). "Dr. Thomas Szasz, Psychiatrist Who Led Movement Against His Field, Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 November 2021.