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Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

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281–290 of 354 posts

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#281
post #119
post #33

> Furthermore, there are ample reasons to doubt whether “brainwashing” permanently alters beliefs This person needs to look at interviews of mk-ultra experiment survivors. Brainwashing is very real and permanent.

MKUltra would be an example in support of the claim that brainwashing is not real. No one is disputing that subjecting someone to drugs will permanently alter their beliefs, anyone who has come in contact with an alcoholic or a heavy drug addict knows this but that's not what brainwashing is. Brainwashing is ability to control someone's thoughts often with the goal of inducing specific beliefs and ideas. While there…

Mkultra was not just drugs. Look into it more. You know another term for brainwashing? Hypnosis! Which is something psychiatrists also do.

Not only did mkultra brainwash people but some survivors forgot everything about their life before the experiment.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#282

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to e…

As a psychiatrist, I'm just going to tip my toe into this conversation:

I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have a target audience of psych professionals. So of course there's a list of 'inaccurate and misleading' terms - you can't simplify something without losing /something/ of its complexity, but it still needs to be communicated.

The other thing to point out is that some of their criticisms are just ... well, outsiders commenting on things they don't know about. It's a team of academic psychologists. Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff - they do targeted 1-on-1 therapy, or group therapy, but they tend to parachute in and out, they're not doing the days-long care-and-feeding of these patients where some of the terminology they're criticizing comes from. For instance, they take issue with the use of splitting, but ... clearly don't work on the unit. Splitting isn't just about wanting to avoid the thoughts of your loved ones being flawed beings; it's about the emotional hyper-sensitivity of a BPD patient resulting in them condemning as awful anyone that is less than entirely positively oriented towards them, because they can't take any negative interaction (see paragraph 1 about "I'm oversimplifying shit to communicate to people outside my profession", so don't come at me to pick nits. I know it's simplified-into-wrongness.) The result is that when they a unit staffer enforces boundaries, they're instantly terrible; as opposed to that "other" staffer that didn't have to enforce boundaries with them, who is wonderful, can I talk to them now please instead of you, you awful monster? And so the psychodynamic 'splitting' leads very quickly into 'pitting staff against each other'. It's not a mis-use of the term, it's a specific manifestation of the term that you deal with on the unit. Which the authors would know, if they were frontline workers rather than consulting therapists.

And the section on pleonasms is just nit picking for the sake of nitpicking.

This article doesn't do anything in the way of making psychology nor psychiatry more precise. This article is a lot of nit picking, in ways that look valid externally but would have anyone familiar with these things wondering why this was worth writing.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#283
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree but it’s an insult to people that actually have it when it’s used casually. Like “bipolar” or “schizophrenic” also.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#285
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not an epidemic, it's merely language and labels being more accurately used within society. You can't possibly know that. And shame on you for speaking so authoritatively on such an important and open scientific question.

That's literally what the linked article is about. From its references: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici... > After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010. Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs.

Okay, so I read the article. So a few thoughts

1) That's a "Meta study" which is a good thing usually, meaning it summarizes results from numerous other studies.

2) Just because one meta-study says something doesn't mean the topic is defacto decided and over. Many controversial topics have many meta-studies.

3) Notice I said since I graduated college in 2010 autism incidence went up 50%. The study you referenced ENDS in 2010. Have the diagnostic criteria changed AGAIN for 13 more years?

4) This article didn't say "We disproved there was an increase in prevalence of autism." They said they couldn't find evidence of that. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

4) We already know for a fact that various stressors including pesticides in utero (or pollutants such as PFOAs which are now in everybody's blood in utero) can contribute to autism. Any research that finds no increase/change in absolute rates of autism at all is highly suspect. Also this article seemed to suggest that all countries had the same prevalence of autism, which would be at odds with very different pollution profiles of different countries.

Maybe in 10 years the rate of autism will still be 1/44, but if it's 1/29 I'm gonna be even sicker of this "diagnostic criteria" stuff. It doesn't seem that hard to get around diagnostic criteria if we really want to -- just make a standardized test and give it to a large sample of children of age 10 (and never change the battery) for 5 consecutive years. The test could be facial expression recognition, theory-of-mind questions, etc.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#286

Honestly, I'm a bit disappointed by the level of discourse this post has generated. I'm also an outspoken skeptic of findings in the field of psychology, but the article is quite well formed and well argued. If anything, accepting the nitpicking from a lot of these comments would result in psychology being _less_ rigorous and precise. A lot of psychology's problems comes from how readily available it seems to be to e…

As a psychiatrist, I'm just going to tip my toe into this conversation: I have not read the entire list. I read a good chunk of it. Almost everything on it is -not- stuff I see among my colleagues, and appears to be how psych stuff is presented /in popular media/ rather than in the profession. Which is fine if one targets this for the science media/science communication types, but it seems very odd to apparently have…

I was curious about this one and wondered if you could based on your expertise shed some light on that section and whether it is also off.

Human body is obviously a rather complex piece of machinery, but chemical imbalance can put things in a bad spot ( lets say too much vitamin D ). I get that 'chemical imbalance' is a very simplistic model, but I always thought it describes some of our bodies' interactions with the world rather well ( even if they are still not understood ).

Would you be willing to elaborate on whether ( or maybe how ) chemical imbalance is used/described in psychiatry in your experience?

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#287
post #110

> (47) Empirical data. “Empirical” means based on observation or experience. As a consequence, with the possible exception of information derived from archival sources, all psychological data are empirical (what would “non-empirical” psychological data look like?). Nonsense. There are plenty of types of data that are not empirical. For example, data from simulations is not empirical data.

Can you elaborate on what type of psychological data simulations you are thinking of?

Isn't fiction an overall non-empirical simulation? Science fiction books are not strictly based on historical events or even facts. Yet we still gain valuable psychological knowledge from them.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This scandal generated a whole host of reports, it collapsed the APA leadership. Books have been written about it. I am not a journalist, nor a historian. And I don’t have enough knowledge about it to answer any detailed questions about it, other then the fact that it happened. I’m sure you can find information by googling e.g. “APA torture” or “James Mitchell” and “Bruce Jessen” the two most prominent psychologists…

Edit period is over, so I’m responding to my own post. My post actually inspired my self to do some googling, and here is an excellent interview from 2009 that goes into the personal story of these two tortures, hopefully it answers some of your questions: https://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/21/the_story_of_mitchell... Do note though that this is before the scandal had reached the APA leadership (which happened in 20…

Thanks super interesting. In addition to the lack of ethics, it sounds like there was no proof that the methods would even work, and it was a pseudoscience.

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For example why most of the value of a todo list is the writing down and ticking off. And tiny todos (fill water bottle) give the same kick as big ones. Now if you understand that the it motivates you to have todo lists, use them and craft them well and build a chain of success.

Having a mental model of why something works for me at least is a big motivator. The laws of thermodynamics don’t help you lose weight but they sure make it clear it is possible (or if your body absolutely cannot burn fat, you die).

Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

#290
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally what the linked article is about. From its references: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici... > After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010. Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs.

Okay, so I read the article. So a few thoughts 1) That's a "Meta study" which is a good thing usually, meaning it summarizes results from numerous other studies. 2) Just because one meta-study says something doesn't mean the topic is defacto decided and over. Many controversial topics have many meta-studies. 3) Notice I said since I graduated college in 2010 autism incidence went up 50%. The study you referenced ENDS…

There have been significant changes in diagnosis of autism in (overlapping categories): adults, women, people of color where the signs of autism were usually assigned to another diagnosis (anxiety, OCD, PTSD, bipolar, etc...).

I'm not a researcher so I can't really comment on the rest, but from all my friends (me included) who have finally realized that we were autistic in our 40ies and 50ies, what it's at least plausible that what looks like an epidemic is just people having a better understanding of the many forms in which autism manifest, beyond non-speaking white boy that likes trains.

I spent all that time thinking I couldn't be autistic because look I have friends and a job and I can sometimes do small talk.

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