A psychiatric disorder is a mental illness diagnosed by a mental health professional that greatly disturbs your thinking, moods, and/or behavior and seriously increases your risk of disability, pain, death, or loss of freedom.1 In addition, your symptoms must be more severe than expected response to an upsetting event, such as normal grief after the loss of a loved one
Examples
A large number of psychiatric disorders have been identified.3 Chances are that, whether or not you or someone close to you has been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, you know something about one or more of the following examples:
- Depression
- Personality disorders
- Anxiety disorders
- Schizophrenia
- Eating disorders
- Addictive behaviors
Symptoms
Examples of ongoing signs and symptoms of psychiatric disorders include:
- Confused thinking
- Reduced ability to concentrate
- Deep, ongoing sadness, or feeling “down”
- Inability to manage day-to-day stress and problems
- Trouble understanding situations and other people
- Withdrawal from others and from activities you used to enjoy
- Extreme tiredness, low energy, or sleeping problems
- Strong feelings of fear, worry, or guilt
- Extreme mood changes, from highs to lows, often shifting very quickly
- Detachment from reality (delusions), paranoia (the belief that others are “out to get you,”) or hallucinations (seeing things that aren’t there)
- Marked changes in eating habits
- A change in sex drive
- Drug or alcohol abuse
- Excessive anger, hostility, and/or violence
- Suicidal thinking
Types
The following list describes the main types (often called classes or categories) of psychiatric disorders
- Neurodevelopmental Disorders -: The many psychiatric disorders in this group usually begin in infancy or childhood, often before a child starts school. Examples include attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, and learning disorders.
- Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders -: Psychotic disorders cause detachment from reality. People with these diagnoses experience delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking and speech. Schizophrenia is probably the best known of these illnesses, although detachment from reality can sometimes affect people with other psychiatric disorders
- Bipolar and Related Disorders -: This group includes disorders in which episodes of mania (periods of excessive excitement, activity, and energy) alternate with periods of depression.
- Depressive Disorders -: These include disorders characterized by feelings of extreme sadness and worthlessness, along with reduced interest in previously enjoyable activities. Examples include major depressive disorder and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), which is more severe than the more widely known premenstrual syndrome (PMS). PMS is not classified as a psychiatric disorder.
- Anxiety Disorders -: TAnxiety involves focusing on bad or dangerous things that could happen and worrying fearfully and excessively about them. Anxiety disorders include generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, and phobias (extreme or irrational fears of specific things, such as heights).
- Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders -: People with these disorders experience repeated and unwanted urges, thoughts, or images (obsessions) and feel driven to taking repeated actions in response to them (compulsions).5 Examples include obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), hoarding disorder, and hair-pulling disorder (trichotillomania).
- Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders -: These psychiatric disorders develop during or after stressful or traumatic life events. Examples include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder
- Dissociative Disorders -: These are disorders in which a person’s sense of self is disrupted, such as dissociative identity disorder and dissociative amnesia..
- Somatic Symptom and Related Disorders -: A person with one of these disorders may have distressing and incapacitating physical symptoms with no clear medical cause.6 (“Somatic” means “of the body.”) Examples include illness anxiety disorder, somatic symptom disorder (previously known as hypochondriasis), and factitious disorder.
- Feeding and Eating Disorders -: These psychiatric disorders are disturbances related to eating, such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder