1. (in a human or other conscious being) the element, part, substance, or process that reasons, thinks, feels, wills, perceives, judges, etc.
Which is all fine and good unless you throw in the delicately woven strands of biology&environment which produce a mental illness. At which point, everything you reason (which no-one else will accept as reason, by the by), think, feel, will, percieve and judge is marred by those errant neuron firings and chemical imbalances. Everyone knows not to trust their eyes, but what do you do when you can’t trust your mind? It is a painful and difficult way to live.
I wondered, then about the phrase “out of your mind”. It traditionally is taken to mean that the person is out of their right mind, that is, they are crazy/mad/insane/etc. So while it could be said about people with mental illness that they are “out of their minds”, if you look at the phrase literally, the problem is not so much that they are removed from their minds, but that they remain within a mind that does not meet the socially or personally acceptable level of healthy/normal.
So maybe being out of your mind isn’t such a bad thing when the mind you’re in is inherently distorted.