Mental Health Concepts: Thought, Mood and Psychopathology

Mental illness defined as a maladaptive response to stressors incongruent with local and cultural norms, against mental health as successful adaptation, then the general symptoms of mental disorders: disorders of thought content such as hallucinations and delusions, and of form including incoherence, illogical and concrete thinking, tangentiality, blocking, circumstantiality and loosening of associations, with formal thought disorder as the hallmark of schizophrenia; mood distinguished from affect and its types; memory from immediate recall to remote memory preserved in dementia; hallucination subtypes and speech disturbances such as dysarthria; and the psychoanalytic, behavioural and biological models of psychopathology, covering the unconscious, the topographic model, psychosexual development, id, ego and superego, neurotic anxiety and defence mechanisms.