Mental illness affects millions around the world.

The symptomology of various mental illnesses can vary depending on the disorder and other variables.  Symptoms can include physical problems, emotional expression, cognitive ability and behavior.

Types of mental illness include bipolar affective disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, anxiety attack symptoms, types of depression, borderline personality disorder symptoms, childhood disorders, and cognitive disorders.

Anxiety or fear that affects normal functioning may be an anxiety disorder.  Some categories of anxiety include Social Anxiety Disorder, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder symptoms (OCD symptoms).

When a person experiences not just the occasional winter blues but an unusual degree of sadness or despair they may be suffering from Clinical Depression.

When a person’s belief’s, language and way they perceive become disordered they may have a psychotic disorder.  For instance, they may be schizophrenic or have a delusional disorder.

There are disorders that seem to originate in the body, but are thought to be related to mental state.  These are referred to as somatoform disorders.

When a person has a problem with memory and thinking they may have a cognitive disorder.  There are many cognitive related illnesses, two of which include amnesia and Alzheimer’s disease.

There are other disorders that involve human functioning like eating disorders, sleep disorders, substance abuse and addictive disorders like gambling.

The causes of mental illnesses are not completely understood.  Problems come about from a combination of biochemical, biological, and environmental sources.

Biochemical causes are connected to the natural chemical processes in the body; therefore, some experts think of mental illness as a brain disorder.  In fact in imaging studies people with mental illness actually have different characteristics in their brains then those people who do not have mental illness.

In terms of biology, researchers believe that people who have a family history of mental illness may be more susceptible to it and the symptoms are more likely to express themselves under stressful life situations.

Environmental factors may play a role as well.  When there are hard to resolve difficult situations, like chronic illness, people can be more susceptible to emotional challenges short and long term.

How is one tested for mental illness?  There is not one test that determines whether someone has a mental illness, for instance there is not a  “bipolar test” to test for bipolar disorder.  Instead there are psychological and medical tests that aid in ruling out other causes for the symptoms.  The procedures include a physical exam, laboratory tests and psychological evaluations with a health care practitioner.  Some of the topics your doctor is likely to discuss with you are your feelings and behaviors.  They may have a depression chat, a chat about depression and the ways depression hurts.

If you believe you may be suffering from a mental illness please speak with your doctor.  In order to get an accurate diagnosis it is helpful to speak with a doctor who is quite familiar with the mental health field.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are studying abnormalities in eye movement that may help diagnose mental illness.

How the eyes track a moving object can indicate problems with the neural circuitry of the brain and appears to correspond to some mental disorders.  For example, those who are schizophrenic have trouble keeping their eyes focused on objects that are slow-moving.

John Sweeney, director of the Center for Cognitive Medicine in UIC’s department of psychiatry, and his  colleagues are spearheading a research study that is being funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.  They are studying and cataloging eye movement patterns in patients diagnosed with psychiatric disorders including depression, bipolar disorder, autism and schizophrenia in order to begin to validate eye movement problems as indicators for a variety of brain diseases.  New technologies allow researchers to precisely measure these abnormalities compared to normal patterns.

“Psychiatric illnesses are not well understood neurologically”, said Sweeney.  The goal of Sweeney and his colleagues is to develop eye movement tests for diagnosing brain disorders.  Tests for many of these illnesses don’t exist today.  For instance there is no scientific bipolar test.  However the field is still in its infancy.

During a child’s development, between ages 8 to 15, the brain undergoes significant changes that affect eye movement control.  Sweeney and his team have been studying eye movement patterns in this age group for 20 years and have been documenting the course of brain and cognitive development during this period.

A variety of tasks test the function of various parts of the brain that control cognitive function and, not necessarily vision, but eye movements.

“Eye movement studies provide a noninvasive way to gain a deeper understanding of the brain dysfunctions at the root of psychiatric illnesses”, said Sweeney.  “We are following patients over time to monitor the progression of their disease and determine whether different treatments are improving their brain and cognitive function.”

Hopefully treatment will be created so that those with mental illness are able to have increasing productivity.

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