The attempt to classify mental illness is an integral feature of the medical model of mental disorder (or psychological abnormality) on which traditional psychiatry is based. Psychiatrists, as medically trained practitioners, regard mental illness as comparable to other kinds of (physical) illness, but the symptoms are behavioural and cognitive rather than bodily.
The vocabulary used by psychologists and other non-psychiatrists, as well as the layperson, to refer to mental disorder is borrowed from medical terminology. For example, deviant behaviour is referred to as ‘psychopathology’ and is classified on the basis of ‘symptoms’ (Maher 1966). The use of such language reflects the pervasiveness of a ‘sickness model’ of psychological abnormality: we tend to think about abnormal behaviour as if it were indicative of some underlying disease.
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