What's the difference...

mental disorder, mental illness, madness, and insanity are very popularly used interchangeably, especially on TV shows, in the news, and stuff like that. There are, however, important distinctions and meanings for each of these different terms.

mental disorder, which is generally used in disciplines such as psychology or psychiatry or medicine. It's a medical term which is typically used to outline diagnoses from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual that's used by psychiatrists.

mental illness is a broad term, and paints mental distress, writ large, as always harmful and individualized. in a fundamentally medicalized and ableist society, this term may allow mental distress to be “taken seriously” by medicine.

madness. quite possibly one of the more sociologically and politically interesting term. It's kind of ubiquitous. It is used for a number of different things. But typically it's used to describe behaviour that seen as extreme or creative or chaotic. Historically, the term has been used in the West to describe “irrational” or distressed behaviour, or situations, or people. It was later that the term, turned into or transformed into a psycho-medical term to describe specifically psychosis. Recently, this once derogatory term has also been experiencing a resurgence and, or, or reclaim from folks who reject that psychological difference is necessarily a bad thing.

insanity is a legal term rather than a psychiatric one. specifically the insanity defense or plea is made by a defendant who claims that they should not be held criminally responsible for their actions due to their severe mental disorder, again, medical term but also use an illegal contexts which precludes them from appreciating the wrongfulness of the act that they've been charged with.

[ID: beige, orang and pink lens flares surround text in pink text which reads: “What’s the difference between..” And orange boxes of text surround the words “mental disorder, mental illness, madness, and insanity”. End of description.]