Is mental illness the same concept as psychosis?

  Mental disorders, also known as psychological disorders or psychiatric disorders, are diseases that are clinically manifested by various biological, psychological, and social environmental factors that result in dysfunction of the brain leading to varying degrees of impairment in mental activities such as cognition, emotion, volition, and behavior. Mental disorders are also commonly referred to as insanity. Mental disorders can be mild or severe, with the milder ones being called non-psychotic disorders and the more severe ones being called psychotic disorders. Psychosis has impaired perception, memory, thinking ability, inappropriate emotional reactions and behavior, and also, the following three criteria should be met  (1) Significantly impaired ability to test reality, neither being able to objectively evaluate situations and environmental things, nor being able to clearly distinguish subjective world reflections, imagination or other inner activities from objective reality, or even distorting objective reality with pathological experiences, such as delusions and misidentification, reality dissociation, etc.  (2) Inability to take care of one’s own life and household chores appropriately or obvious hindrance to labor, work and study.  (3) Unaware of their psychosis, inability to discriminate between psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, as well as inability to cooperate with treatment.  Psychosis mainly includes schizophrenia, affective psychosis, reactive psychosis, paranoid psychosis, various types of organic or symptomatic psychosis, epileptic psychosis, and mental retardation of moderate degree or more.  Among the psychiatric disorders, those that are not severe enough to meet the three diagnostic criteria for psychosis are collectively called non-psychotic mental disorders, such as neurasthenia, hysteria, anxiety disorders, hypochondria, depressive neurosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias and other neuroses, personality disorders, sexual dysfunction, sexual perversion, drug addiction, psychosomatic disorders and mental retardation of a lesser degree, various sleep disorders, and various stress reaction states or Emotional reactions, etc.  Strictly speaking, the line between normal and abnormal mental activity is quite blurred. People with normal mental activity can also have limited mental abnormalities, and people with mental abnormalities do not have unthinkable mental activity as a whole. In fact, human mental activity is equivalent to a circle, and mental abnormality is only a segment of the circle. If a person’s mental normalcy is compared to white and mental abnormality is compared to black, then there is a huge buffer area between white and black, i.e., the gray area – the sum of non-organic mental suffering, including mental imbalance, emotional disorders, behavioral problems, etc., which all interfere with people’s normal life to varying degrees. In terms of groups, human mental health is not black and white, but small at the poles and large in the middle. Therefore, people should not ignore the existence of gray areas and should do timely correction of psychological problems. Because, psychiatric and non-psychiatric disorders are not static and can be transformed into each other under some specific conditions.