Is mental illness a neurological disorder?

  In daily life, people often refer to psychotic episodes as neurological disorders, and even in cultural works such as movies, TV dramas, novels and broadcasts, psychiatric disorders are actually not the same thing at all as neurological disorders, but two groups of disease units with completely different natures.  Mental illness is a type of disease that causes disorders in the higher functions of the brain under the influence of various pathogenic factors inside and outside the body, manifesting as abnormalities in sensation, perception, thinking, emotion, volitional behavior, attention and memory intelligence, etc. Its various symptoms reflect mental dysfunction, not necessarily abnormalities in the physiological functions of the human brain.  Neurological diseases are diseases in which various harmful factors act on the human body, resulting in abnormalities and loss of physiological functions of the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves and muscles, or damage to tissue structures. The familiar diseases such as stroke, encephalitis, epilepsy, brain tumor, trigeminal neuralgia, etc. are neurological diseases.  The above two groups of diseases are both different and related. For example, some mental diseases, especially some diseases of neurological disorders, can also be manifested as some manifestations similar to neurological diseases, such as numbness and pain or general discomfort, which is a somatic conversion symptom of mental disorders. Another example is Alzheimer’s disease and other organic brain diseases, they have both abnormalities in brain structure brain physiological function, but also can appear a variety of psychiatric symptoms. Therefore, patients who have been treated in neurology for a long time and cannot be cured, especially when the symptoms are inconsistent with the neurological distribution or when the symptoms change frequently, they should seek a psychiatrist in time and may receive unexpected results.