The begins of a definition of mental illness is lost on most people. It's an illness so it's left to doctors.everything which is assumed of illness and the treatment is assumed when mental behavioural and emotional disorders all called mental illness.

The recognition of this hole in precision in thought is oft disregarded and assumed to be the irrelevant pursuit of mad fanatics like myself. What I mean is that most people don't spend a few years consumed by the pursuit of a scientific-like definition of a concept because such precision lacks relevance to most people.

Most people asume mental illness is a real illness and it is an illness because doctors treat it. What that usually means is that there's a biological component. This is the biomedicial model of mental illness. This is the only way it can be called an illness: there must be a biological deficit. Anything else, fundamentally, must be treated by a different body of people, not doctors.

It also means the individual has the privileges of medical illness removed. I never made it more than a few pages through Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness but enough to learn what a psychiatrist, a person judging people, would consider was vitally important in the question of what is mental illness and what is something else.

The paradigm of mental illness allowed or was finessed by the social model of disability. People with biological illness such as blindness are made disabled by society. People who can't walk can use a wheelchair but they're still disabled by steps. Ramps and lifts make them less disabled by society. A biological illness is, in practice, a negative experience because they don't have the same life chances or opportunites. They're disadvantaged but by things which can be changed if society or civilisation were different.

This idea of mental illness as an illness because of temporary states of society wherever, or perhaps simply culture, is important too.

This is the impact. This is the other aspect of the paradigm of medicine. The difference causes like to be worse for a person. A person who needs a wheelchair may not be able to walk but they can have access to the same experiences and opportunities if, in some ideal point in society's evolution, by which the impact on the individual's life dissapates.

In research and the signifcantly more scientifically advanced DSM system diagnoses are justified and defined by a prognosis. They're illnesses because enough symptoms over a specified period, rigorously defined and adhered to, can reasonably accurately define the course of a group of individuals. Schizoaffective disorder is often misinterpreted as inbetween schizophrenia and bipolar. It is in that the research trials define it as having better outcomes than schizophrenia and worse than bipolar. It's just the research only applies when the reference definition is used, the one based on the outcome studies which define the difference in prognosis from the two other disorders thereby solving the Kraeplin dichotomoy yet disregarding it at the same time. It defines the difference between the two prototype mental illnesses in prognosis but, importantly, there is no biomedical paradigm definition.

Perhaps most signifcant depending on how hardened you are to the amount of bullshit in psychiatry the recent revisions of DSM seek to remove this criteria. It is not because it doesn't exist. The studies which show a different occupational or social outcpme from schizophrenia or bipolar are still valid. The problem is practising clinicans couldn't reliably use the diagnostic criteria. An illness is subsumed into one of two other classes because doctors couldn't diagnose it properly. And yet it is something which exists within the paradigm which everyone but doctors seem to call mental behavioural and emotional disorders.

Admittedly they call physical conditions disorders rather than illneses in the reference textbooks. The use of psychiatric language us eludicating though. It is something useful to communicate the complexity of a concept which most readers might consider simple: it's just an illness dealt with by doctors.

If it's a biological illness it is treated like any other illness. Thankfully. The privilege of the invalid is extended to the individual. If it isn't an illness then the same system is not automatically extended to this group.

For anyone on benefits because of mental illness this may be a horrible opinion but please bear with me a moment. The importance here is delineating two concepts: biological illness and something else. It may be sufficient to see them as the same thing. I disagree. I think certain types of people are made disabled by society. The illness is not in the person. The problem is a society which does accept the diversity of the human condition and being.

This other paradigm of mental illness shouldn't be called mental illness because it's not an illness. Just something which is judged as different by society and not acccpeted, either directly or indirectly.

So what I often use as a mind opening example is homosexuality. What was once an illness and is no longer. There is biomedical evidence, albeit as weak as the rest, to support the idea it was an illness. It isn't. It's normal but different. Once criminalised this behavioural and emotional disorder became pathologised the depathologised in the US in the 1970's when DSM was revised. It took the World Health Organisation till the early nineties to follow suit and by default the UK too. What I find fascinating is that in the US there was a debate as to whether there should be a disorder created to pathologise the distress which came with awakening of sexuality. They chose not to. This disorder was normal to the process and thereby not relevant to psychiatry. In fact today the modern criteria pathologises gay people who think it's a mental illness, i.e. a person who's gay but wants to be 'treated' to be not gay, and thereby thinking of it as a mental illness, is mentally ill for thinking that way.

There is biomedical paradigm evidence that homosexuality is a mental disorder. And it is. But not biologically. Fifty or a hundred years ago a homosexual having to hide who they were in a world which despised their kind was going to do worse at work and in life....I mean have poorer social and occupational outcomes.

Blah bblah blah...I'm tired and lonely and unhappy but happy and maybe not suicidal for the first tiime in ages. Work this shit out yourself. Words, concepts, practivcality versus the concepts in the head of the person making them real.

In short...and something I'll sort out as a proper article: illness or not. Make the delineation. If it's illness then doctors treat it. If it ain't...if it is cultural or social norms....then opn your mouth wide enough for me to slip my chocolate salty balls in. Just pop them in your mouth and such them.