Finkelstein:Other symptoms in addition to the ones defined by DSM-IV-TR...
...pssst...the current psychiatric "bible" is the DSM 5. The DSM IV is considered to be out of date.
As far as whether or not the GB are "mentally ill" - I challenge anyone to look in the DSM 5 and not find a disorder that you can fit in. The term "mentally ill" covers a broad spectrum of disorders, ranging from depression to full blown psychosis. Mental illness is not something that means "people who think different than me", and it does not mean "people that we can call schizophrenic". Schizophrenia is a complicated disorder that should not be bandied around to explain things about people's behavior that they don't understand. That does a great disservice to people who actually do suffer from schizophrenia.
The organization itself can be classified as "psychopathic". So, it would depend on how a person was diagnosing the people who run that organization - are they being measured against the larger society's standards of "normal" or are they being measured against the organization's notion of what "normal" is? In the WT culture, what may seem "mental illness" to outsiders could very well be "normal" for the context that those people are operating in.
Are the GB functional within their own culture ? Probably.
Are the GB functional within the larger culture? Probably not.
phizzy: It interests me that the Mental Health professionals exclude religious delusions from the list of delusions they rate as "mental illness". Why ?
Because the pope and all other special people who make their living on deluding other people could be then be classified as having a mental disorder. The DSM 5 has to exempt religious delusion - the manual comes out of a culture that still places religion on a pedestal. Classifying religious delusion as a mental disorder would collapse the social structures that produced the manual.
The only place that you would be able to find religious delusion classified as a mental disorder is in cultures that do not have religion - but, then, you would have to add a new disorder - "authority delusion" - into the mix.