Mental disorders are thinking problems that negatively impact a person’s life and disrupt their normal daily function. They can be related to physical problems or reactions to life experiences. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is used for the official classification of each mental disorder, but changes can sometimes lead to overdiagnosis.
Mental disorders are any type of thinking problem that takes someone beyond the boundaries of accepted norms. For something to be classified as a mental disorder, it usually must also negatively impact some aspect of a person’s life. Generally, each individual mental disorder has its own standardized collection of symptoms that doctors use to make a diagnosis. Mental disorders can be related to actual physical problems with the brain, such as chemical imbalances, or they can be reactions to certain life experiences.
One of the main things that separates a mental disorder from most normal mental difficulties is severity. According to most experts, a mental disorder should not be diagnosed unless the problems are severe enough to disrupt a person’s normal daily function in some way. For example, many people may have a fear of spiders, but would normally only receive a diagnosis of arachnophobia if that fear was extreme enough to cause problems.
Some mental disorders are present from birth. These often include psychosis-oriented illnesses such as schizophrenia, along with other compulsion-related disorders. Some of these diseases are caused by actual brain damage, while chemical regulatory processes cause others, but in general all are related to physiology.
Some other mental disorders are related to emotional problems. For example, people may have major behavior changes after going through certain extreme events, such as war or abuse. Other people may have a temperament that makes them prone to certain disorders and thus have life experiences that actually trigger the onset of these problems.
There is a great book called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” which is used for the official classification of each mental disorder. This book is periodically updated to reflect different diagnostic options for psychologists based on new research. Sometimes a small change in the book can lead to big changes in how patients are diagnosed or treated.
In some cases, these changes can be somewhat negative because doctors may occasionally jump on the bandwagon of a particular diagnosis to no avail. For example, some people believe that Asperger’s syndrome is diagnosed too frequently. When it was first added to the handbook, the disorder was studied and experts suggest it was very rare, but after it was added, doctors began to consistently diagnose it to the point where many people feel it was being abused.
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