What is Mental Illness?

Mental illness causes significant distress so as to make normal function in a human being impossible. Mental illnesses can be psychological or behavioral. They include mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorder, eating disorders, and personality disorders. These are just a few examples of mental illness. Mental illness can affect anyone. One of the most common simple disorders that can escalate into mental illness is depression. If depression is left to become chronic and debilitating, it can eventually lapse into mental illness.

Eating disorders are another example of a disorder that can develop into a severe mental illness without treatment. While not all eating disorders get out of control, many do. Eating disorders, like any other type of mental illness, need treatment and proper care to help the patient recover. Depression and eating disorders are two of the most common, but two of the easiest to treat. Other more serious conditions can prevent the sufferer from leading a normal life and from ever having the feeling that they are in control.

Disorders like mood disorders, personality disorders, psychotic disorders, and anxiety disorders are significantly harder to treat, and may require years of therapy and the use of drugs to control them. Many of these forms of mental illness are not detected until they manifest into criminal behaviors later in life. Because these disorders can cause a distortion in thinking, they falsely convince the sufferer that they are making good decisions. This, paired with hallucinations, delusions, and the belief that they hear voices, can be very dangerous and cause dangerous behavior.