Types of Mental Illness

Mental illness is a medical condition that disrupts a person's thinking, feeling, mood, ability to relate to others and daily functioning. Just as diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity for coping with the ordinary demands of life.

There are many different conditions that are recognized as mental illnesses. The more common types of mental illness are:

• Anxiety disorders: People with anxiety disorders respond to certain objects or situations with fear and dread, as well as with physical signs of anxiety or nervousness, such as a rapid heartbeat and sweating. An anxiety disorder is diagnosed if the person's response is not appropriate for the situation, if the person cannot control the response, or if the anxiety interferes with normal functioning. Anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, and specific phobias.

• Mood disorders: Mood disorder is a less severe form of depression. Although less extreme, mood disorder causes long-lasting moodiness. With mood disorder, low, dark moods invade your life nearly every day for two years or more. Mood disorder is contrasted with a full major depressive episodes that lasts two years or longer, which is called chronic major depression. The most common symptoms of mood disorder are feelings of hopelessness, changes in eating patterns, disturbed sleep, constant tiredness, an inability to have fun, and thoughts of death or suicide.

• Psychotic disorders: Psychotic disorders are severe mental disorders that cause abnormal thinking and perceptions. People with psychoses lose touch with reality. Two of the main symptoms are delusions and hallucinations. Delusions are false beliefs, such as thinking that someone is plotting against you or that the TV is sending you secret messages. Hallucinations are false perceptions, such as hearing, seeing, or feeling something that is not there. Schizophrenia is an example of a psychotic disorder.

• Eating disorders: Eating disorder is an illness that causes serious disturbances to your everyday diet, such as eating extremely small amounts of food or severely overeating. A person with an eating disorder may have started out just eating smaller or larger amounts of food, but at some point, the urge to eat less or more spiraled out of control. Severe distress or concern about body weight or shape may also signal an eating disorder. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder are the most common eating disorders.

• Impulse control disorders: Impulse-control disorders are psychological disorders characterized by the repeated inability to refrain from performing a particular action that is harmful either to oneself or others. It occurs when individuals cannot control impulsive behavior. Pyromania (starting fires), kleptomania (stealing), and compulsive gambling are examples of impulse control disorders.

• Addiction disorders: Addiction is a chronically relapsing disorder that has been characterized by compulsion to seek and take the drug, loss of control in limiting intake, and emergence of a negative emotional state reflecting a motivational withdrawal syndrome when access to the drug is prevented. Addiction has been conceptualized as a disorder that involves elements of both impulsivity and compulsivity that yield a composite addiction cycle. People with these disorders become so involved with the objects of their addiction that they begin to ignore responsibilities and relationships.

• Personality disorders: Personality disorders are a group of mental health conditions in which an individual differs significantly from an average person, in terms of how they think, perceive, feel or relate to others. Those who struggle with a personality disorder have great difficulty dealing with other people. They tend to be inflexible, rigid, and unable to respond to the changes and demands of life. Antisocial personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and paranoid personality disorder are common types of personality disorder.