No. I should clarify that. I'm a clinical social worker. My background was in mental health clinics and psychiatric hospitals in doing clinical work. Then, about 23 years ago, I specialized and got training in this area.
But to respond to your question, I agree with Dr. Marshall. Sometimes you get into a case of semantics. To me, mental illness is a biological process such as schizophrenia, where you can actually see that there's something biologically going on with the person. There has been no research that has identified that as being present in someone who is a child molester. Even among child molesters, if you look at the term “pedophile”, in North America The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is what's used primarily for diagnosing mental disorders, and a lot of the people I see who have sexually molested a child don't even qualify for the diagnosis of pedophile, which really refers to someone who has a persistent sexual preference for prepubescent children.
Sometimes the reasons for molesting a child have nothing to do with sexual preference. It's a behavioural choice--something a person has learned to do. It provides them with some sort of relief of an emotional or psychological need they're experiencing and they persist in it due to the lack of alternatives.