There is abundant evidence of brain disease causing what is defined as "mental illness." Individuals with strokes in various parts of their brains can behave in unusual but often somewhat predictable ways, and these individuals are said to be mentally ill according to common psychiatric nomenclature.

Bipolar illness is far more genetically based than most forms of heart disease, cancer, diabetes or hypertension; involves demonstrable brain changes and quite predictable overall behavioral changes; and is certainly defined as a "mental illness" by psychiatrists.

Those with major depression after a myocardial infarction are 3-5 times more likely to suffer morbidity and mortality 6 months after their event than their non-depressed peers, and this difference is not accounted for by more severe heart disease in those with depression. Indeed, major depression after MI, in many studies, predicts cardiovascular morbidity and mortality as well as or usually better than more common predictors of future vascular injury, including smoking, hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, etc.

In unmedicated identical twins, one of whom has schizophrenia, there are often obvious visually accessible brain changes indicative of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental damage. Brains, like other organs, evolve in time.

Huh? Serious mental illness with no underlying brain disease?

There is more rational and scientific basis to believe in ghosts, pyramid power, ESP, and rhino horns as aphrodesiacs, than to doubt hundreds of thousands of studies, many accessible even to a lay audience, showing the ways in which serious mental illness is caused by complicated, often genetically mediated, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative processes gone awry.

Nowadays, failing to recognize this, even if ignorance is the reason for the oversight,in a forum where scientists, philosophers, and apparently pseudoscientists commingle, is nearly as provocative as denying the Holocaust or denying that slavery occured. Yes, this stupidity injures the mentally ill and causes discrimination and hardship.

Believing that mental illness in a person is "intelligently designed" by its owner is rather ironic, in an article critisizing intelligent design in evolutionary theory.