Wize University Psychology Textbook > Psychological Disorders
What is a Mental Illness?
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What is a Mental Illness?
The criteria for what is considered a mental illness often overlaps with what is considered "abnormal" for a society in that point in time.
Abnormality is highly dependent on context and social norms!
Example: Once a week, Joe paints his whole body green and starts screaming in crowded public places, even when there are children around.
Would this be considered abnormal? Not if Joe was a huge hockey fan and attended games wearing full body paint every week!
One helpful approach is to consider the 3 D's of abnormality:
- Distress - how much suffering is it causing for the individual?
- Deviance - how much does the behaviour stray from social norms?
- Dysfunction - how much is it affecting the individual's daily functioning?
Patterns of behaviour, thoughts, or feelings that contain some degree of these three are more likely to be considered as a mental illness
When measuring mental illness at the population level, incidence refers to the number of new cases of a disorder in a population at a certain time, while prevalence refers to the total number of individuals who have that disorder in a population at a certain time.