Mental health ‘labels’: what do they mean?
Everyone’s experience of a mental health problem will be personal to them. However, mental health professionals are able to recognise patterns of symptoms in a persons’ mood or behaviour as indicating a specific problem or disorder, enabling them to make a diagnosis and prescribe a course of treatment.
Most types of mental distress or mental illness falls into one of two main types: neurosis or psychosis. Examples of neurosis include depression, severe anxiety and phobias, while examples of psychotic illness include schizophrenia and bipolar (affective) disorder (or manic depression).
The term psychosis is used when someone has disordered thoughts, delusional beliefs or hallucinations. They may lose touch with reality and not realise they are unwell. Someone suffering with neurosis is less likely to lose touch with reality and generally knows they are unwell. However, people can experience a wide range of individual symptoms, which can fall into both distinctions.
People with mental health problems can find they are given a different diagnosis from time to time. This may be because their symptoms have changed or because they have more than one condition, but it may also be because a new doctor disagrees with the earlier diagnosis.
Mental health professionals sometimes use medical terms or jargon, which can make it difficult to understand what’s going on. Do ask for anything you don’t understand to be explained.
Dual Diagnosis
The term ‘dual diagnosis’ is used to refer to a person with two conditions, and does not specify the disorders. Therefore if someone has a dual diagnosis, they could have:
- Mental health and substance misuse problems
- Learning disability and mental health problems
Support for people with a dual diagnosis used to be provided for by two or more different service providers eg substance misuse and mental health, however services are developing to provide specialist care to meet the complex needs of the service user.