What Constitutes a Mental Illness?

Exciting news everyone! My previous post concerning personal ambivalence towards diagnosing, labeling, and medicating mental disorders has gained some validation. Below is the reading--from an actual publication--describing the "confusion" in dictating what constitutes mental illness.

BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

Descriptive Psychopathology: The Signs and Symptoms of Behavioral Disorders by Nutan Atre Vaidya and Michael Alan Taylor:

The DSM conceptualizes a “disorder” as a condition that is clinically significant and that causes distress or disability. This definition fails because it is overinclusive, incorporating as disorders non-illness such as demoralization, jealousy and revenge, and criminality. By the definition, normal pregnancy might be considered a disorder. Others have argued that a more precise definition of illness is: a condition that causes harm and that derives from dysfunction. Harmful dysfunction involves “something going wrong with the functioning of some internal mechanism, so that the mechanism is not performing one of the functions for which it was „designed‟ by natural selection.”

This conceptualization works for most presently recognized psychiatric disorders, but may fall short for some of the personality disorders.

Confusion also arises from the fact that persons who appropriately receive classification labels are by definition deviant, but deviance has several fathers. Brain structural and physiological lesions (genetic and acquired), maturational variation, and indoctrination at odds with the cultural context cause deviation. Further roiling the conceptual waters is the fact that some deviation is advantageous (e.g. high intelligence, talent).