Twelve propositions on the differences between neurosis and mental illness

(Note: In the following points, I use the term “neurosis” in a somewhat broadened sense (including psychosis and other psychical malaises).  It becomes clear that we lack a suitable term for (what is badly designated by calling it) “mental illness” that fits the alternatives sketched here.)

I.
A mentally ill person is a subject of psychiatry; a neurotic is a subject of psychoanalysis.  

II.

Mental illness is abnormality.  (This is true by definition, as illness is a form of abnormality).  Thus, it can make sense for mental ill persons, like criminals, to be removed from society.  Not so neurosis.

III.

If you are mentally ill, there is something wrong with you. If you are neurotic, you merely have problems that you can how to better solve.

IV.
The mentally ill are (assumed) not capable of being ethically responsible subjects; thus, learning does not avail them. The mentally ill person is a slave to their condition, while the neurotic is a free subject who can become more so.

V.
Mental illness is now believed to be innate and genetic, and therefore incurable.  Not so neurosis.  

VI.
Mental illness is, by definition, a potentiality for crime, even though statistics do not support the association.  Not so neurosis.  

VII.
Mental illness is treated by seeing an authority who knows the truth about the patient that the patient himself cannot know.  Neurosis, contrariwise, is best alleviated or cured through what the person himself learns through self-examination.  

VIII.
Mental illness is shameful to those it is attributed to because treatments for it may be punitive.  (And society punishes by exclusions and special treatments those it shuns.) Not so neurosis. 

IX.
The understanding of neurosis is immanent to it, available from within, through insight.  The understanding of mental illness is extrinsic, available only from without, inaccessible to insight. 

X.
Neurosis can be ameliorated or cured through a process of learning, as in psychoanalysis, which proceeds from the Socratic assumption that the good life is the examined life.  Not so with mental illness, which is thought untreatable through interventions to the person’s thinking.

XI.
Many so-called mental illnesses are merely the negative manifestations of ethically (and clinically) neutral cognitive and personality traits that can be exemplified (“symptoms”) in more or less useful or happy ways.

XII.
The arts often have relevance for understanding neurosis.  Not so mental illness.