How do you get mental illness?

We all know that the human body can develop various diseases. Mental illness is one of them, and the treatment of mental illness needs to be determined based on the specific condition of the human body. The severity of illness in each mental patient is completely different, and attention should be paid to the use of medication or other psychological treatments. But people should be clear about how mental illness occurs?

Most people believe that mental illness is caused by stimulation. If someone around them suffers from a mental illness, everyone will be suspicious, "He must have been stimulated by some kind of mental illness." In fact, this understanding is incomplete. Mental illness is not entirely caused by mental stimulation. The so-called stimulation, that is, social and psychological factors, are also closely related to the occurrence of mental illness. However, there are exceptions. Among mental illnesses, there is a type of mental disorder that is directly caused by psychosocial factors, namely reactive mental disorder.

Reactive mental disorders were previously called psychogenic mental disorders, meaning that the mental disorders are directly caused by psychological factors. However, we also found that some people become ill while others remain unharmed despite suffering the same kind of blow. This is because whether mental factors cause illness depends not only on the nature and intensity of the mental factors, but also on the patient's personality and the degree of importance they attach to the stimulating event.

Reactive mental disorders usually have the following characteristics: First, before the onset of the disease, the patient generally suffers severe mental trauma, such as natural disasters such as earthquakes and fires, or sudden tragic events such as the accidental death of relatives or terminal illness. There are also long-term depression such as tense family relationships, marital emotional crisis or neighborhood conflicts. Second, mental symptoms often appear immediately after a traumatic event, and mental disorders reappear after a long time. Third, the manifestation of mental symptoms revolves around the content of the traumatic event and has corresponding emotional experiences, such as grief, fright and anxiety, etc. People around can understand or show sympathy. Fourth, after the mental factors are eliminated or the traumatic environment is left, the mental symptoms will be relieved quickly, but returning to the old place, mentioning the past or being moved by the scene may cause fluctuations in the condition.

Reactive mental disorders can be divided into acute and chronic. Acute ones often occur suddenly under sharp and intense mental stimulation. The patient may appear dull, dazed, silent and motionless, and have no response to external stimuli. There may also be aimless actions, impulsive destruction of property, or running away, and the patient often cannot recall the events afterwards. In chronic cases, under the influence of persistent and complex mental factors, the patient becomes sensitive and suspicious, and feels that he is being monitored or followed by people around him, and that some people may want to harm him, etc., and finally forms relatively fixed delusions. The patient's symptoms may persist, the disease progresses slowly, and the personality remains intact. Apart from the delusional object, the patient can get along well with the environment and even continue to work and study normally. In addition, reactive depression is more common, in which the patient suffers from a series of depressive symptoms such as low mood, loss of interest, loss of appetite or negative world-weariness under severe mental trauma. Less common are reactive excitement, etc.