Professional conceptions of mental illness and related issues

Abstract

Psychiatric health professionals are generally in the position of having to treat and care for persons who have been labelled as mentally ill. For this reason it was thought useful to examine just how such professionals conceive of the term ‘mental illness’. The term is difficult to define, perhaps even unanalysable. The boundaries of mental illness are a persistent point of debate: it is seen as a myth, as being analogous to physical illness or disease, as maladaptive behaviour, as the result of incongruent thoughts and beliefs or conflicting unconscious desires, as a divided self-concept or as a complex social product that has ultimately formed the basis for psychiatry. Underlying such criteria there seems to be a preconception of what the person is. Indeed, different theories make different assumptions about the person which, in turn, lead to different perspectives of mental illness.