Mental disease refers, at present, to disorders of perception, cognition, emotion, and behavior. The disorder may be mild or severe, acute or chronic, and may be attributed to a defect of mind or body or of some unknown combination of the two. A diagnosis of mental illness is the judgment that an individual is impaired in his or her capacity to think, feel, or relate to others. In mild cases, the impairment may intrude on a person’s ability to gain satisfaction from meeting the challenges of everyday life. In severe instances, an individual may be thought so dangerous or incompetent that sequestration within a psychiatric facility is necessary, with a resulting loss of rights normally granted to citizens.
The Problem of Mental Illness
The simple title of this section belies the extraordinary scope, complexity, and controversial state of contemporary psychiatric thought. Some have argued that if the myriad types of disorders bedeviling humankind were ranked by the net misery and incapacitation they caused, we would discover that psychiatry captures a larger share of human morbidity than does any other medical specialty. It seems ironic - if not tragic - that a clinical field of such magnitude is at the same time distinguished among its peers by a conspicuous lack of therapeutic and philosophical consensus. That the discipline lacks a set of internal standards by which to differentiate unequivocally the correct theory from the false, or the efficacious therapy from the useless, is an open secret.