What exactly is the difference between a neurological illness of the brain and a mental illness?
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Neurological illnesses encompass things like Parkinson’s, Epilepsy, Alzheimer’s etc. Mental illness is just that. Mental. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD etc. The difference between the two is slight yet at the same time huge.
A mental illness occurs in a healthy brain that is structually identical to that of other people, however, something causes the brain to not act in the normal way. An example for this would be depression.
A neurological condition on the other hand isn’t caused by some imbalance in brain chemistry or the like, but rather by the fact that the brain itself is structurally different from the average person, and such the brain cannot function like that of everyone else to begin with. An example of this would be autism spectrum disorder.
You could compare this to hardware and software. A mental illness would be akin to a coding error in a software. The computer is running just as intended, but the code it’s running has a bug that causes it to behave in unintended ways, whereas a neurological condition would be the computer itself being built differently (Such as the processor using a different rounding function) and giving you a different output as a result (For instance, a platform moving up and down in a video game slowly moving upwards, thus causing the platform to meander upwards ever so slightly each cycle, moving it up above the level border if you allow enough time to pass)
One is able to be identified pathological, that is a neurological disease, such as parkinsons, it causes a drop in dopamine levels, it is caused by damaged nerve cells
A mental illness is often idiopathic and more often than not arises from an experienced emotional trauma in which the brains functions have altered. It cannot usually have a precise cause.
I liken it to saying a brain like a computer has hardware and software. Neurological disease is a hardware problem whereas mental illness is often software issues.
Mental illness is a “functional problem”, meaning that there may not be anything physically wrong with the brain, but the function is still impeded.
Neurological illness is a “physical problem”, as in there is something wrong with the brain (or other nervous) tissue (or its metabolism, or its blood supply etc) leading to problems depending on where in the brain the problem is.
There is overlap; chronic mental illness can cause the brain to develop physical (or *organic* as the official term goes) problems. And neurological illnesses often lead to mental issues.
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