Schizophrenia is suggested to be a brain disorder rather than a mental illness. It is labeled as a mental illness because the symptoms align as such and the causes of the disorder are not completely known and understood. Psychiatrists R. D. Laing, Silvano Arieti, Theodore Lidz and others have argued that the symptoms of what is called mental illness are comprehensible reactions to impossible demands that society and particularly family life places on some sensitive individuals. Laing, Arieti and Lidz were notable in valuing the "content" of psychotic experience as worthy of interpretation, rather than considering it simply as a secondary and essentially meaningless marker of underlying psychological or neurological distress. Laing described eleven case studies of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and argued that the content of their actions and statements was meaningful and logical in the context of their family and life situations.