If mental illnesses can be categorised according to certain symptoms, for example, Schizophrenia and hearing voices, seeing things etc… then surely certain part(s) of the brain are not working correctly / damaged / underdeveloped etc in all sufferers… just as a broken arm for me is the same as someone 3000 miles away. So why do we say that often say Mental Illness’s are Psychological rather Psychiatric?
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It’s more that our understanding of the human brain is lacking so we can’t look at a brain and go “yup, that’s the problem right here”
In short, we understand the symptoms but don’t understand the physical cause. And even if we can look at a brain scan and go “well….that person definitely has Schizophrenia” we *definitely* don’t know what physical changes we can make to fix that.
There may come a time where our understanding is good enough that it’s treated the same as other physical problems, or it may forever be unknowable.
To describe this weird predicment we use the term “psychological”
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