Mental breakdown

Nervous illness

A mental breakdown, nervous breakdown or mental health crisis is an acute, time-limited, mental disorder that manifests primarily as severe, stress-induced depression, anxiety, paranoia, or dissociation in a previously functional individual, to the extent that they are no longer able to function on a day-to-day basis until the disorder is resolved. A nervous breakdown is often closely tied to psychological burnout, severe overwork, sleep deprivation, and similar stressors, which may combine to temporarily overwhelm an individual with otherwise sound mental functions. A mental breakdown can last for hours at a time, to months at a time. While these time periods can vary between different people, their reactions to the mental breakdown may also vary. These terms have not been formally defined through a medical diagnostic system such as the DSM-5 or ICD-10 and are nearly absent from scientific literature regarding mental illness. In addition to the concept of mental disorder, some people have argued for a return to the old-fashioned concept of nervous illness. In How Everyone Became Depressed: The Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown (2013), Edward Shorter, a professor of psychiatry and the history of medicine, says: