Really well written article. Personally, I will still use these expressions:
Antidepressant medication Chemical imbalance Genetically determined
Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
251–260 of 354 posts
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#252Not on the list: "Oh, it's just my OCD" -- Either you have been diagnosed (and consequently suffer from OCD) or you have an obsessive personality (sometimes a quality). But OCD is a diagnosis, abusing it do describe a personality trait doesn't serve the many many people impacted by the disorder. -- From someone with an affected loved one.
There’s a great episode of the Australian TV series You Can’t Ask That which interviews a group of OCD sufferers about their lived experience. It really opened my eyes to just how appallingly cavalier it is to refer to one’s minor neuroses as “OCD”. An excerpt from the show: https://youtu.be/tkrFgKW5LvY (Australians can stream it on iView)
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call psychology a 'pseudo-science', more that it's at a level of development comparable to 19th century medicine, when the concept of infectious disease being due to transmittable microbes or viruses was not understood. Most 'psychological disorders' today are not diagnosed based on specific physical-chemical tests, i.e. one can say with high certainty that a patient has drug-resistant tuberculosis using a…
Interesting. This implies that psychology is strongly likely to "get better," like out of it's 19th century phase? I see no reason to believe that?
They're not trying to get better. It's a religion (cult?).
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has nothing to do with psychology. It's standard terminology used in medicine. > Symptoms cannot be seen and do not show up on medical tests. Some examples of symptoms are headache, fatigue, nausea, and pain. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...
It is a standard terminology that is recent and only in English. It has nothing to do with the original meanings of the words "symptom" and "sign" in English and other languages (where "symptom" is any sign of a disease, while "sign" is any sign of anything). The standard medical terminology in other languages is "subjective symptoms" and "objective symptoms". In my opinion, whoever has chosen these artificial and ar…
> only in English.
In Norway, doctors will distinguish between (subjective) "symptomer" and (more objective) "tegn" (and "tegn" can be directly translated to "sign") whereas laymen will use "symptomer" for everything
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#255Not on the list: "Oh, it's just my OCD" -- Either you have been diagnosed (and consequently suffer from OCD) or you have an obsessive personality (sometimes a quality). But OCD is a diagnosis, abusing it do describe a personality trait doesn't serve the many many people impacted by the disorder. -- From someone with an affected loved one.
There's also self-diagnosis though. Which in some cases, and for some types of conditions, can be as or more accurate than a professional one (where the professional might only see a facade)...
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#256Not on the list: "Oh, it's just my OCD" -- Either you have been diagnosed (and consequently suffer from OCD) or you have an obsessive personality (sometimes a quality). But OCD is a diagnosis, abusing it do describe a personality trait doesn't serve the many many people impacted by the disorder. -- From someone with an affected loved one.
There’s a great episode of the Australian TV series You Can’t Ask That which interviews a group of OCD sufferers about their lived experience. It really opened my eyes to just how appallingly cavalier it is to refer to one’s minor neuroses as “OCD”. An excerpt from the show: https://youtu.be/tkrFgKW5LvY (Australians can stream it on iView)
Not all OCD is extreme though, even when diagnosed.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#257> Nevertheless, the attitude-change techniques used by so-called “brainwashers” are no different than standard persuasive methods identified by social psychologists, such as encouraging commitment to goals, manufacturing source credibility, forging an illusion of group consensus, and vivid testimonials The brainwashing techniques used by various cults, criminal gangs and regimes go far beyond these gentle methods. Pa…
>I sure hope social psychologists don't use torture
Oh, you'd be surprised. Psychiatry and psychology have some very dark corners, in the past and now. Some of them are well documented and studied too.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, compaining about that makes about as much sense as compaining about the racist implications of the term "good Samaritan", although I agree that, in retrospect, it's pleasantly surprising that social justice warriors haven't tried to ram though a de facto ban anyway.
If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe. The lines kind of blur when you're talking about groups that are divided by some odd combination of ethnicity, religion, and nationality. Regardless, if you…
> If I understand correctly, Samaritans have the same ethnic roots as Jews. The differences were more religious and ideological than racial. So with that in mind, saying the term "good Samaritan" is specifically racist doesn't really hold water. Xenophobic, maybe.
According to the Australian Human Rights Commission (an independent government agency) [0]:
> Racism takes many forms and can happen in many places. It includes prejudice, discrimination or hatred directed at someone because of their colour, ethnicity or national origin
So, even if a difference is "ethnic" rather than "racial", it can still be "racism" (at least by that definition of "racism"), since "racism" can be based on "ethnicity" or "national origin" rather than "race".
Contemporary science does not support any distinction between "race" and "ethnicity": the distinction is just a cultural construct specific to certain societies. So culturally-specific, in fact, that it even differs between different countries in the English-speaking world: US government publications officially acknowledge a distinction between "race" (e.g. African-American) and "ethnicity" (e.g. Hispanic) – even while admitting the distinction is grounded in the particularities of US culture and history rather than anything scientific or universal. By contrast, Australian government publications studiously avoid making any official distinction between them, and in practice treat the two concepts as interchangeable.
[0] https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/ahrc_sr_2021_... PDF page 8
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time we have a need to make sense of things. And having a rough relatable framework can be part of the therapy. I can also see why it might be dangerous “e.g. dopamine hit good, what foods/drugs will give me that”
What becomes clearer by labeling things with neurotransmitters? Did you just not know your own habitual motivations? In that case some technical jargon won’t make you wiser or smarter.
> What becomes clearer by labeling things with neurotransmitters?
The relation with addiction.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not the case. Often the "politically correct" version is not actually more correct, but is replacing some common phrase that is declared obnoxious by some very small unrepresentative minority of people who coincidentally make their living as activists. Yes you can be houseless but not homeless, but you can also be homeless and not houseless. It's an utterly stupid distinction predicated on an intentionally in…
"first, do no harm" includes psychological safety. To use a bold example, there's a difference between telling your client they are "overweight" and telling them they are a "fat ass".
It doesn't. Doctor's and psychs feel entitled to treat their patients in any abusive and harmful manor. It won't matter, because nobody would believe the anyway.
A huge percentage of Doctor's are abusive scumbags. Everything you hear about medical ethics, they do the opposite.
They are bigoted, and emotionally abusive, gaslighting monsters, who stubbornly refuse to self reflect.