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Toledo, OH 43614
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Mental Retardation and
Mental Illness
What's the Difference?
a fact sheet for print and
broadcast journalists
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Mental Retardation |
Mental Illness |
| 1. Mental
retardation* refers to subaverage intellectual functioning. |
1. Mental illnesses are medical
conditions that disrupt a person’s thinking, feeling, mood,
ability to relate to others, and daily functioning. Just as
diabetes is a disorder of the pancreas, mental illnesses are
medical conditions that often result in a diminished capacity
for coping with the ordinary demands of life. Mental illness has
nothing to do with intelligence.
Serious
mental illnesses include major depression, schizophrenia,
bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic
disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and borderline
personality disorder. |
| 2. Mental
retardation refers to impairment in social adaptation. |
2. A person with a mental
illness may be very competent socially, but may have a character
disorder or other aberration. |
| 3. National
incidence: 3% of the general population. Ohio incidence: 1.4 to
1.9% of the general population of Ohio is estimated to have
severe functional limitation due to mental retardation or other
developmental disabilities. |
3. Mental disorders fall along a
continuum of severity. Even though mental illness disorders are
widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is
concentrated in a much smaller proportion — about 6 percent, or
1 in 17 Americans — who suffer from a serious mental illness. It
is estimated that mental illness affects 1 in 5 families in
America. |
| 4. Mental
retardation is present at birth or occurs during the period of
development. |
4. Mental illnesses can affect persons of any
age, race, religion, or income. Mental illnesses are not the
result of personal weakness, lack of character, or poor
upbringing. Mental illnesses are treatable. Most people
diagnosed with a serious mental illness can experience relief
from their symptoms and manage symptoms by actively
participating in an individual treatment plan. |
| 5. In mental
retardation, some degree of intellectual impairment can be
expected to be permanent. |
5. Individuals with mental illness and their
families receive support and services from private practice,
their local mental health authority (which may be county-based
or regional) and the Ohio Department of Mental Health.** |
| 6. A person with
mental retardation can be expected to behave rationally at
his/her functional level. |
6. A person with mental illness may vacillate
between normal and irrational behavior. |
| 7. People with
mental retardation can also experience different types of mental
illness with symptoms such as hallucinations or severe
depression, secondary to the condition of mental retardation. |
7. The term mental illness covers a wide
variety of symptoms that may indicate that someone is in
emotional trouble, including: belligerence, excessive moodiness,
suspicion and mistrust, or poor emotional control. |
*Mental retardation is a
developmental disability. People with developmental disabilities may
experience difficulty in such areas as self-care, language, mobility,
learning, self-direction, independent living or self-sufficiency. Some
common developmental disabilities in addition to mental retardation are
epilepsy, autism, cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, and Tourette
syndrome.
**Additional resources: NAMI –www.nami.org
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