The concept of mental illness

In recent years it has often been suggested that there is no such thing as mental illness. In naive Cartesianism this assertion starts out from the assumption that illness may develop solely from physical causes. Before clarifying what mental illness is, we should ask what is understood by the general notion of 'illness'. A constituent of the general disease concept is an unvoluntary and sufficiently serious disturbance of vital functions that needs to be defined in detail-and not just any region of disease causes or symptoms. The general disease concept can be defined in the context of everyday life and in the social and legal context and be filled with detailed normative and threshold values in the medical context. A society with a humanitarian orientation responds to the incapacity of its members owing to illness with attempts at institutionalization, which find their expression in norms, privileges and duties. Special disease concepts were developed for defining specific diseases and distinguishing them from others. Since solely the general disease concept, on which the distinction between illness and deviations from moral or legal norms is founded, is aetiologically neutral, it can be filled with any explanation model at the physical or at the mental level in the frame of specific disease concepts: e.g. with the one cause--one disease model, with multifactorial models or behavioural dysfunction models.