Mental breakdown is another name for nervous breakdown in the medical terms. It is related with the mental illness of person. The disorder takes place mostly due to depression. During the yesteryears, this disorder was known as melancholia, vapors, neuralgic disease, neurasthenia and prostration. Initially, all the doctors and the medical professionals assumed it to be a disorder of the nervous system.

Mental breakdown can also be called severe attack of mental illness. There are a number of causes for mental breakdown and they include stress, unresolved grief, career burnout, social stress, unemployment, divorce, death, deceived by a loved one and failure. The mental illness includes depression due to some factors in life, psychosis, dissociation, post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and severe stress.

Then later on they realized that the disorder is due to a disease in the mind of the person. The catalog in today's medical world includes a number of scientific diagnoses that are present in the DSM-IV. The DSM-IV integrates psychotic break schizophrenic episode, manic break, post traumatic stress disorder, panic attack.

Failure, a cause of mental breakdown
The causes of mental breakdown vary from person to person. It is a temporary illness that gets reduced as time passes by. A nervous breakdown mainly occurs due to exposure to extreme or unremitting and overwhelming stress.

A majority of people suffer from this disorder mainly due to failure in life or something else. Failure affects a person's morale and depreciates his self esteem and conscious. When a person is morally low, he may easily enter into mental depression that leads to nervous breakdown. Thus, it is seen that mental breakdown may affect any one at any point of time.

A person can come out of a mental breakdown with the help of a doctor or a psychiatrist. If a person cannot come out of failure then he is more prone to mental breakdown for the second time also. Some people have breakdowns which were bound to happen. The cause of such type of depression is due to genetic disorder like schizophrenia or bi polar depression.

Other causes of mental breakdown:
Other causes of breakdown might include chronic and unresolved grief, unemployment, academic problems, career burnout, social stress, post-war trauma, chronic insomnia and other sleep disorders. Many other kinds of problems like serious or chronic illness of a family member, divorce, death of a family member, pregnancy, a traumatic, violent, or near-death experience and deception by a loved one or rape also might lead to mental breakdown.