er...

thanks sky.

who would have thought... scientists don't need to investigate the nature of water or trees or disorder or illness or anything like that they can simply look the terms up in the dictionary and find out what those terms refer to!

though... lets have a look...

Main Entry: 1dis·or·der
Pronunciation: (")dis-'or-d&r, (")diz-
Function: transitive verb
1 : to disturb the order of
2 : to disturb the regular or normal functions of

Main Entry: ill·ness
Pronunciation: 'il-n&s
Function: noun
2 a : an unhealthy condition of body or mind b : SICKNESS 2

so... according to the online dictionary disturbing the order / regular or normal functions of something constitutes disorder.

(the problem here is how we fix the function / order of a system)

and according to the online dictionary is something is unhealthy or sick then it is ill.

(the problem here is how you decide what unhealthy / sick means. these terms are just as problematic - if not more so - than the term 'illness' that we are trying to define).

how are these supposed to be different?????

actually, what i was getting at is that some theorists think that mental disorder and physical disorder involve different meanings of 'disorder'. even though the same term is used there are two distinctly different meanings.

sometimes people get around this by maintaining that medicine is more properly about disorders whereas psychiatry is more properly about illness. (that is typically the way the distinction runs though it occurred to me that you might want to reverse those terms such that psychiatry is about disorders and medicine is about illnesses).

some theorists think that 'disorder' entails 'dysfunction' but that 'illness' entails both 'disorder' (dysfunction) and harm where harm is a normative notion. on this account disorder is typically taken to be objective because it evolution by natural selection is supposed to be the relevant causal process to fix the relevant functions in a non-normative way). illness is typically taken to have a subjective component, however, in that harm is normative and harm is neccessary to turn a disorder into an illness.

you seemed to want to use those terms in reverse (which is fine). the main notion, however, is that medicine is non-normative (because it only needs the non-normative notion) whereas psychiatry is normative in a way that medicine is not because it involves the notion of harm which is essentially normative.

when you said that you thought illness was different to disorder i wondered what you meant. i.e., i wondered if you were meaning to convey a stand on this issue and i wondered which stand you were intending to convey.