Mental illness is a disorder in a person’s behaviour or thinking, which Cromby and others (2013) define as ‘distress’. Distress is explained as a type of experience endured, with its effect being dependant on the subjective awareness of a person. This suggests that experiences associated with distress are influenced by our biological capabilities, however, Cromby and others (2013) also outline that it is impossible to set down criteria for mental illness which surpasses throughout history, and therefore arguably mental illness is also a product of cultural and historical norms. For example, historically religious visions may have been seen as a blessed calling from God, whereas these days would be viewed as bizarre and due to stress in ones life.
Although these outlined behavioural problems and wider cultural values are clearly significant, Claridge (1985) summarises that psychiatry has traditionally thought that the cause of mental illness is in the nervous system and that the brain is just as likely as the rest of the body to succumb to disease. However, Bowers (2000) argues that if in fact schizophrenia was physiological, its symptoms would be objective, and as they are not, it cannot have a physiological basis. Nevertheless, Bowers (2000) agrees with Claridge (1985) that diagnosis is a matter of socially extended judgement, which causes difficulty in valid research.
Other lines of evidence point to the theory of an environmental role in psychiatric disease, including research with identical twins (Schmidt 2007); if one becomes schizophrenic, the risk to the other is on average less than 50%, suggesting that environmental influences must somehow be responsible.
Nonetheless, stigma prevails, as identification of mental illness is entangled by values of culture and time. However, in principle it is an illness of the brain, which is perhaps in severe cases biomedical in origin, although typically as a result of life experiences. Perhaps the confusion in definition goes someway to explain why the significance of mental health budgets continues to be debated.
