Mental Illness
Mental Illness, disorder characterized by disturbances in a person’s thoughts, emotions, or behavior. The term mental illness can refer to a wide variety of disorders, ranging from those that cause mild distress to those that severely impair a person’s ability to function. Mental health professionals sometimes use the terms psychiatric disorder or psychopathology to refer to mental illness. There are no blood tests, imaging techniques, or other laboratory procedures that can reliably diagnose a mental illness. Thus, the diagnosis of mental illness is always a judgment or an interpretation by an observer based on the speech, ideas, behaviors, and experiences of the patient. For the most part, mental health professionals determine the presence of mental illness in an individual by conducting an interview intended to reveal symptoms of abnormal behavior. That is, the professional asks the patient questions about his or her mental state: “Do you hear voices of people who are not with you...