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What is mental illness?

Just like any other illness, mental illness involves a wide range of problems, symptoms and clinical pictures.

There are many different types of mental illness, most of them minor. In fact, over 90% of all mental illness is dealt with in the Primary Care setting by the General Practitioner or GP.

Symptoms can include feelings of anxiety, depression or low mood, perceptual disturbances (e.g. voices), unusual beliefs and withdrawal from social contact.

Many of us experience some of these symptoms for short periods of time and manage to cope with family support, counselling or short courses of medication.

When these feelings occur to such an extent, or for a long period of time, we may then find it more difficult to cope with everyday life. We tend to see this degree of incapacity as a serious mental illness.

What causes mental illness?

Most mental illness problems appear to occur as a result of independent life events, which happen to us and our difficulty in coping with them.

We may become vulnerable to mental illness at a specific time, e.g. after bereavement, loss of a job or following childbirth.

In these circumstances we experience emotional stress and some of us may develop conditions like anxiety or depression. We are also more prone to develop long term illness such as schizophrenia, at times of stress.

The way that others see, help and respond may be very important in aiding recovery.

There are now reliable definitions of the different types of mental illness and ways to measure their severity and development.