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The Different Types of Mental Illness in the World Today
from:When mental illness is mentioned, people often think that there is only one type or classification. As long as it is associated with a person's brain, they believe that all such illnesses belong under one umbrella. In reality, there are a lot of different types of mental illness that plague the people of the world today, and these mental illnesses are classified in a few different ways as well.
Let us find out about some of the more widely used lists of mental illnesses that belong to the most prominent psychiatric organizations and practitioners. There are actually two main classifications of mental illness and they include the different types of mental illnesses that seem to be very prevalent and common in the world today. The two classifications belong to two of the major authorities of mental health, which both have their own distinct list. The WHO or World Health Organization and the APA or American Psychiatric Association have come up with lists of their own to account for the types of mental illness that are common around the world, and the categories that they have on these lists can be easily compared with one another.
The list of the WHO that accounts for the different types of mental illness is called the ICD-10, which is short for International Classification of Diseases. The ten, of course, signifies the number of categories that are in the list. The categories are organic, schizophrenia, mental, mood neurotic and six other fields of psychological interests.
The APA or American Psychiatric Association’s list is called DSM-IV, which is a manual of the different mental disorders that people in the world are known to have. In this list by the APA, you can find terms like clinical disorders, personality disorders and general medical conditions. You can easily see from these terms that the WHO and the APA have different terms for the different classifications and types of mental illness that they have to deal with. While these terms may sound very different from one another, there are a few that do coincide and are rather similar.
The approach that each mental health organization uses for categorizing and analyzing the different types of mental problems may also be similar or very different, and the ways that they approach these problems are often dependent on the classifications that are being used. Aside from these two main classifications, there are alternative classifications that some psychiatrists also use, such as the Latin and Chinese mental illness classifications. All these classifications can be used effectively in the study and diagnosis of mental illnesses, only that they have different terms and divisions for different conditions.
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