Mental disability vs Mental illness

What’s the difference?
Isn’t mental illness a mental disability?
Isn’t mental disability a mental illness?

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I think that mental illness is one that affects peoples emotion, or behavior. As for mental disability I’ve never herd of it. Though if your referring to intellectual disability then that is different.

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But sz can cause intellectual decline, cognitive symptoms.

I feel mentally disabled, staying in bed all day everyday.

You can be mentally ill and still work.

If you’re mentally disabled, that would mean to me that you can’t work and require some sort of government or insurer assistance.

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But many szics can’t work. I stay in bed all day everyday, my parents do everything. I see mentally disabled ppl work and get married but I can’t. They even have a dating website for the mentally disabled but I haven’t seen one for sz.

You stay in bed all day by choice. I’d say you are on the ‘learned helplessness’ curve.

I have schizophrenia. I work. I don’t stay in bed all day.

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But my psychiatrist doesn’t say so, he say’s I have negative symptoms and that there is no meds yet.
I wasn’t like that before schizophrenia. Negative symptoms are real, they study it in medschool and psychiatry.

And yet you are able to intelligently post on this forum all day.

Hmmm…

Ofc its easy, I am in bed with my cellphone.

Its the meds, I stopped meds for a year once and I had 0 negative symptoms. I was able to live alone.
But I was scared of ppl and nearly killed myself and my brother. There is no way out, its either positive or negative symptoms for me.

Only you know your limitations. I’m not in your shoes.

I hope you can snap out of it and lead a more productive life down the road.

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Mental illness is thinking you run the universe.
Mental disability is knowing you can’t do the job.

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That makes sense, thanks!

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Lol, are you being sarcastic?

Well, a mentally disabled knows his limits which is better than a schizophrenic who doesn’t know his limits.

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It is my impression that in some of the literature, mental illness is referring to symptoms, disability referring to how your difference affect functioning. Roughly: a disability is constituted by the demands and expectations of society. If there would be more ramps and special toilets and so on, being in a wheelchair would be less of a disability. Some people claim there is no such thing as mental illness, only mental disabilities.

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yeah the hard facts are you are actually in the learned helplessness stage. it sucks, its where you give up and stop trying.

you can change though. you have that power.

take baby steps though.

Lets say you stay in bed for 20 hours a day. Try to stay out of bed for 19 hours a day for a few days. If you conquered that then try 18 hours. and so on.

I used to sleep for 10-16 hours a day. now i sleep about 7-10

Set tiny goals.

For me I struggled immensely with getting started on things. Like if i needed to study I had a check mark list thats starts with ‘‘study math for 5 minutes’’.
why 5 minutes? because that sounds acheivable for me. Then I continue from there.

negative symptoms will still be there but you can achieve a decent level of functioning if you consistently work at it.

you can do it dude :+1:

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Even Wikipedia is quite vague about the term.

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