Mental vs. Physical Illness

The biggest, and only legitimate thing mental and physical illness share is that they both cause suffering to whoever they affect. Mental and Physical illness are not the same thing any more than a lemon is an apple. They are both fruit; that is all.

Physical illness is often times a lot harder to cure than physical illness. This is largely because the physical body is easier to diagnose and treat, and because we understand things we can see better than things we can't. We have hundreds of years of doctors to diagnose physical problems, but we are still in the midst of figuring out the mental ones.

If someone breaks their arm, they can go to the doctor who can put their arm in a cast, give them some painkillers, and say "come back in a month and it'll be healed". The body can be trusted to heal itself, except in rare circumstances.

The mind, however, once affected, cannot be trusted to heal itself. That is the very nature of mental illness; there is no safeguard with which it can just "go away". Sure, if someone goes through a bad break up, or suffers grief from the death of a family member, their emotions will run their course, and eventually the person will be mentally normal again. But if their is something wrong with the way that person's mind runs through and reacts to those emotions, there's no telling when, or if, they will get past them.

Mind illnesses can often express themselves in obsessions, or obsessively repetitious thoughts. Through therapy, one may learn to control those thoughts, but there is really no guarantee that any amount of psychology will work. That's just the nature of it. It's an inanimate science, and no matter how logical the break down of Freudian psychology, no two minds are the same. Bodies however, are all basically similar.

So, in their diagnosis, treatment, and healing, physical illness and mental illness are really not the same thing at all, and can't be treated as such.