The Most Common Kinds of Mental Disorders

Mental health awareness is crucial to understanding the problem and how to live with it. However, not many are familiar with how it is a broad condition with several categories.

According to psychologists, there are seven major mental disorders:

  • Anxiety
  • Mood
  • Psychotic
  • Eating
  • Personality
  • Dementia
  • Autism.

Each category contains a minimum of four types of disorders, some stretching to ten.

This article will walk you through four of the most common categories. We’ll make sure to provide you with examples along the way as well!

Anxiety Disorders

Anxiousness is a feeling of distress, fear, and apprehension. More so, it is common to feel anxious during situations that trigger our fight or flight response.

However, developing an anxiety disorder is much worse than just feeling anxious.

What sets the feeling apart from the disorder is the unusual intensity and frequency of its occurrence.

An individual may feel anxious when facing a tough situation. However, someone with an anxiety disorder will most likely feel anxious even over trivial events.

Being anxious may cause your heart to race, your feet and palms to feel cold, and make breathing quite a chore.

Nonetheless, an anxiety disorder will make you feel so much more than those. For example, fainting, loss of breath, lightheadedness, excessive body pain, and panic attacks are some of the most common things you can experience.

Despite its intensity, anxiety remains to be the most common kind of mental disorder globally.

Disorders that fall into this category include the following:

  • Generalized Anxiety Disorder
  • Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Mood Disorders

Understanding mental disorders: common types explored.
Understanding mental disorders: common types explored.

Like anxiety disorders, mood disorders get worse and consistent versions of normal experiences.

Mood swings are a common effect of many influencing factors, such as hormonal imbalance. It is normal to go through them, and they are often not as bad as they sound.

Unfortunately, mood disorders are not as gentle as mood swings. And they often do not require any cause either.

These disorders cause various negative effects on one’s mind and body. And these effects may range from sadness and hopelessness to guilt and self-hatred.

Mood disorders are random, instant, and heightened bursts of emotions that affect 1 in 10 adults worldwide.

Medications and treatments for these kinds of disorders are common and easily accessible. Yet, mood disorders are not as easy to heal as other mental disorders.

A few examples of mood disorders are:

  • Depression
  • Bipolar disorder
  • Dysthymia.

Psychotic Disorders

Unlike the first two kinds of disorders we have discussed, psychotic disorders are in no way ordinary.

Disorders like these cannot be described as “worsened” or “intensified”. More so, they are excruciating and extremely dangerous.

Furthermore, psychotic disorders cause excessive delusion and hysterical emotions that prevent individuals from seeing reality.

These “delusions” not only mess with their measures of what’s real or not but may also make them excessively violent. Consequently, it might even cause self-harm or suicide. Hence, it is crucial to have the necessary interventions to possibly prevent the worst-case scenario.

Drug abuse, extreme stress, trauma, and other factors are what psychiatrists believe to be the causes of such disorders. Meanwhile, psychotic disorders include the following:

  • Schizophrenia
  • Brief psychotic disorder
  • Paraphrenia

Personality Disorders

This kind of disorder falls right in between. They are not as bad as psychotic disorders but not as light as mood and anxiety disorders.

Personality disorders cause an individual to develop toxic and unhealthy thinking, behaving, and functioning. As a result, it causes them trouble perceiving, understanding and relating to those around them.

In addition, personality disorders require regular psychotherapy treatment to avoid them from worsening over time.

Examples of personality disorders include the following:

  • Borderline personality disorder
  • Narcissistic personality disorder
  • Antisocial personality disorder
  • Dissociative identity disorder.