A behavioral or a psychological pattern which occurs in an individual and is believed to be the reason behind causing distress or disability and which is not generally a part of normal development is often referred to as mental illness or mental health disorder.
There are various conditions that are categorized as mental health disorders and the common types include anxiety disorders, mood disorders, eating disorders, psychotic disorders, personality disorders, addiction disorders, etc.
Anxiety Disorders - These kind of illnesses are often chronic and can be spotted in individuals right from childhood or can suddenly occur after the occurrence of an incident, which often is the trigger.
The common symptoms include sweating, hypertension, muscle spasms, etc and at times these in turn lead to exhaustion and fatigue.
Anxiety disorders generally include post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, specific phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, etc.
The various treatment options are bringing change in lifestyle, pharmaceutical therapy, psychotherapy, etc Personality Disorders - This illness in an individual can result in inflexible and extreme personality traits and which in turn distresses the individual or can cause problems at home or work or any other social gathering.
The individual's thoughts and behavioral patterns can be so different from what the society expects that they start interfering his or her own functioning.
Examples of such behavior include obsessive compulsive personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, etc.
Mood Disorders - These kind of illnesses are also referred to as affective disorders and generally involve periods of feeling overly happy or persistent feeling of being extremely sad or fluctuations from extreme sadness to extreme happiness, etc.
The most common examples of mood disorders include mania, depression, bipolar disorder, etc.
Eating Disorders - This type of illness is generally defined as having eating habits which are quite abnormal and may be related to excessive or insufficient food intake.
However, the reasons behind them are quite complex and not yet clear.
Various causes which can be attributed to eating disorders are child maltreatment or child abuse, parental influence, social isolation, cultural pressure, peer pressure, etc.
In the United States, binge eating disorder is most common.
Binge eating disorder is characterized by the following traits - consuming food when depressed or sad, eating large quantities of food when not really hungry, etc.
Psychotic Disorders - Distorted thinking and awareness are the characteristics of psychotic disorders.
Among the most common symptoms of this disorder are delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions are the imaginary false beliefs of the patients that he or she assumes to be true and hallucinations are described as the process of experiencing sounds or images which do not exist in real, for instance, hearing voices, etc.
An example of a psychotic disorder is Schizophrenia.
Mental health disorders can generally be caused due to a combination of sources and in majority of these cases no single cause or reason is established.
The more common view is that these disorders are a result of genetic vulnerabilities influenced by environmental stressors.