via a painful symptom), disability (impairment in one or more important areas of functioning), increased risk of death, or causes a significant loss of autonomy; however it excludes normal responses such as grief from loss of a loved one and also excludes deviant behavior for political, religious, or societal reasons not arising from a dysfunction in the individual.DSM-IV predicates the definition with caveats, stating that, as in the case with many medical terms, mental disorder "lacks a consistent operational definition that covers all situations", noting that different levels of abstraction can be used for medical definitions, including pathology, symptomology, deviance from a normal range, or etiology, and that the same is true for mental disorders so that sometimes one type of definition is appropriate, and sometimes another, depending on the situation.In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) redefined mental disorders in the DSM-5 as "a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individuals cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning." The final draft of ICD-11 contains a very similar definition.The terms "mental breakdown" or "nervous breakdown" may be used by the general population to mean a mental disorder. The terms "nervous breakdown" and "mental breakdown" have not been formally defined through a medical diagnostic system such as the DSM-5 or ICD-10, and are nearly absent from scientific literature regarding mental illness.
The Greeks coined terms for melancholy, hysteria and phobia and developed the humorism theory. Mental disorders were described, and treatments developed, in Persia, Arabia and in the medieval Islamic world. Europe
Middle Ages
Conceptions of madness in the Middle Ages in Christian Europe were a mixture of the divine, diabolical, magical and humoral, and transcendental. In the early modern period, some people with mental disorders may have been victims of the witch-hunts. While not every witch and sorcerer accused were mentally ill, all mentally ill were considered to be witches or sorcerers. Many terms for mental disorders that found their way into everyday use first became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. Eighteenth century
By the end of the 17th century and into the Enlightenment, madness was increasingly seen as an organic physical phenomenon with no connection to the soul or moral responsibility. Asylum care was often harsh and treated people like wild animals, but towards the end of the 18th century a moral treatment movement gradually developed. Clear descriptions of some syndromes may be rare before the 19th century. Nineteenth century
Industrialization and population growth led to a massive expansion of the number and size of insane asylums in every Western country in the 19th century. Numerous different classification schemes and diagnostic terms were developed by different authorities, and the term psychiatry was coined (1808), though medical superintendents were still known as alienists. Twentieth century
The turn of the 20th century saw the development of psychoanalysis, which would later come to the fore, along with Kraepelins classification scheme.