Confused people who think mental illness is the same as mental disability

Incredibly, even a psychology student dragged this stinking ignorant opinion into a conversation recently, and I had to sit on my fists to stop myself punching her as she talked up a 'contraversial' opinion that disability and illness are one and the same.

People with mental disabilities are more vulnerable to mental illness, sometimes because of their disability, but just as often because they do not receive useful psychiatric care, or have suffered bad things in their lives that bring on mental illnesses.

You tend to be born with a disability and it will affect intellectual development; mental illness tends to happen after childhood and, often, it can be managed, treated, or, hopefully, cured.

There is a term, psychiatric disability, that describes someone so mentally ill they cannot usefully function in society.

Tom doesn't have a mental illness; he's about as likely to get a bit miserable as any other Spicer kid, we've all got a bit of a gloomy gene. He has a wonky gene and a misshapen chromosome, and he just got baked different as he developed in the womb and in his very early years.

Mental disability in a foetus can be caused by having a mentally ill parent who is drinking excessively, as it can a mother who has nothing to eat, which in turn damages the foetal development. But if anyone wants to try and tell me mental disability and mental illness are the same thing, perhaps in a debate type sort of a forum, I would be delighted to step up to that particular plate. Poorly educated 'free-thinkers' and hippies, especially, love to promulgate this asinine view. Then again, perhaps they are themselves a bit, you know...