These factors maintain or exacerbate mental illness. Perpetuating factors include:

Unrealistic beliefs: Patients harbor multiple fears, most of which are unrealistic or exaggerated. For example, the subject often speaks of the fear of dying, going insane, losing control of oneself, leading to a sense of imminent catastrophe and resulting in avoidance behavior.

Anticipatory anxiety is the fear of being afraid again, the fear of reliving the same traumatic experience. The immediate consequences of such fear are avoidance or escape from the situation. Two attitudes contribute to perpetuating symptoms: positive reinforcement, which is a form of reward following a behavior and encourages its repetition. Positive reinforcement is common especially in certain types of mental disorders such as phobias and obsessions.

For example, in a phobia, when the individual flees from a frightening situation, they immediately experience relief, which becomes a form of reward and therefore leads them to repeat this behavior to be relieved again. Secondary gains result in a reduction of responsibilities for anxious patients. Their tasks are taken over by those around them. For example, a woman who is afraid will no longer go out alone, will no longer do her shopping, will no longer drive her children to weigh, is under the care of her family who takes over her worries for her. All of this reinforces her disorder so that she is exempt from her responsibilities.

Situational factors: lack of rest, lack of physical exercise, drug or alcohol abuse, lack of sleep, non-compliance with prescribed treatment. All of this perpetuates the symptoms of mental disorder. For this reason, every effort must be made to avoid them.

Most of the time, the entire general population is exposed to the above-mentioned risk factors; but only a small proportion of genetically vulnerable individuals will develop a mental disorder. Thus, it is the interaction between certain risk factors and genetic vulnerability factors that will be responsible for the onset of mental disorder. For example, relatives of patients with schizophrenia are, given their genetic vulnerability, more sensitive to risk factors.

Several types of mental illnesses can be identified, sometimes with common symptoms and most often with symptoms specific to each disorder. Therefore, there is not a single mental illness as many believe, but several types of mental illnesses. These have been the subject of numerous classifications.

The classification proposed here is one that groups together a set of mental disorders with certain common characteristics…

This text is an excerpt from the book “Deliverance From Depression” written by Pastor Boniface MENYE.

We invite you to read the following article “Therapeutic Means of Treating Mental Disorders“.