I must admit I looked through this and I'm a little confused as to why it's on hacker news
Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
311–320 of 354 posts
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#312Not exactly related, a friend recently told me that calling someone a "spaz" who acts absurdly or with an excess of enthusiasm, is no longer (/ was never ?) appropriate. My boss and other boomer (ok technically gen-xer) coworkers use this term liberally, as does my boomer mother and myself and others of my cohort.
I do not want to dwell on correctness of this term or of prescribing / proscribing language, only to share that this is the sort of the thing I had thought the article would be about.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#313I think the aritcle is pretty good (I have a strong disiagreement with one of the 50 terms, but otherwise I think they did a good job). I'm relatively new here at HN, but as a psychologist (who also dabbles in hacking) some of the reactions do support, sadly, the stereoytype that computer/engineer-types suffer anoagnosia (the lack of knowledge of what you do not know). Some engineers do not understand that the world…
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Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#314It seems pointless, difficult and dangerous all at the same time to try to police our speech and writing. Some things have benign usage that is not harming anyone or any group of people and convey the intended meaning better than alternative words.
Did you read the article? Because even with a cursory scroll would you find that it's clearly not about policing speech. For example: > (22) p = 0.000. Even though this statistical expression, used in over 97,000 manuscripts according to Google Scholar, makes regular cameo appearances in our computer printouts, we should assiduously avoid inserting it in our Results sections. This expression implies erroneously that…
Your comment diluted the "discourse" more that the "reactionary nonsense" given that the first thing you do is using snark to signal that yiu are in the "cool tribe".
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, as long as it's your thoughts and not mine. I have no problem with other people policing their own speech and thoughts. My problem starts when they start to enforce what they found on other people.
Do you recognize that there is a distinction between enforcement, and being told "using this particular form of speech is harmful to certain people - if you continue choosing to use it, you are choosing to present yourself as someone who values your own speech over someone else's comfort, and will be judged accordingly"? If so, then we're in broad agreement (though we may disagree about where the line between social…
All the "speech is harmful" is exactly the thought policing we are talking about: when you hear something that you don't like you candecide to ignore it instead of trying to make everyone in the world stop thinking "bad thoughts". It's your job having the emotional maturity to not screech at any percieved misgiving not mine to not think or say things that may or may not be hurtful.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#316Honestly, 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…
> 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.
Great summary. I think the author's real audience is themselves and their real purpose is self-affirmation. Their article became popular on HN is because we (myself included) love to believe we know more than the common folk. A 50+ word list that purports to correct others is too tempting not to agree with. Particularly, when most of us don't have the expertise to know redefining 50+ words is not actually useful for its claimed audience.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same reaction. The phrase "chemical imbalance" can't die soon enough. I've met some very smart people who were misled into thinking there's much more scientific evidence than exists that there's some innate brain chemistry that's linked to mental illness. In general, people overestimate how much of psychiatry is first-principles instead of black box statistical conjecture. The first huge hint that there's n…
> they don't measure any brain chemicals when they do psychiatric diagnosis They do not measure anything in my experience. They just take an educated guess at what will fix your issues based on heuristics, and then just wait to see if you love/hate whatever they gave you. If what they give you did not work, then on to the next option until something works or all options are exhausted (which they usually just send you…
> As I grow older, I am more convinced that psychiatry is more of an art than a science.
There's a bit of an educated guessing component to it, but mental health professionals are starting to use genetic testing to take some of the guess work out.
Psychiatrists go through the same four years of medical school that other doctors do. This gives them a broad enough background to help diagnose other diseases that have psychological symptoms.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#318I think the aritcle is pretty good (I have a strong disiagreement with one of the 50 terms, but otherwise I think they did a good job). I'm relatively new here at HN, but as a psychologist (who also dabbles in hacking) some of the reactions do support, sadly, the stereoytype that computer/engineer-types suffer anoagnosia (the lack of knowledge of what you do not know). Some engineers do not understand that the world…
Some are working at making soft science more of actual testable, isolateable, repeatable, predictable science.
To be in psychology requires you to accept the ideas and culture of the "soft sciences". The system of universities and higher education, largely aligning with political and financial interests. One cannot be against it and be apart of it. That is the grand filter that removes dissent.
In current day all any diagnosis requires is a few 30 minute meetings and the right words in accordance with the dsm5. They'll get a diagnosis that's wrong, and be on their way with medications not proven effective. Ask me how I know. That's not science, it's a paycheck.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? "Histrionic" has no relation to "hysterical."
If two words aren't related it can still be a problem if people think they are, and language evolution will start treating them as if they are (backformation).
That’s true, but few people know the origins of hysterical, let alone histrionic. You could just as well argue that the average speaker doesn’t know that hysterical was once a gendered, misogynist term and that therefore it’s no longer problematic.
Re: Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 > The standard medical terminology in other languages is "subjective symptoms" and "objective symptoms". Brazilian here. We use the term sinais e sintomas , meaning signs and symptoms. Doctors learn these signs in medical semiology classes and through practice in hospitals.
I believe that these special meanings for "signs" and "symptoms", which deviate from their prior meanings in the English language, must have been used for the first time in some influential medical handbook from some important US Medical School, like the Harvard Medical School.
Then they must have spread in USA, and then in some other countries, like Brazil and Norway, which have been mentioned here.
At least France and Germany seem to be among the countries that have kept the traditional terms "objective symptoms" and "subjective symptoms".
Another poster said that "language changes" and this must be accepted. While there are many people who believe this, I do not agree with it. When language changes in order to speak about new things, that is obviously fine. When language changes because someone thinks that the traditional words are not cool any more and they make arbitrary changes in the meanings of the words, that, in my opinion, is lazy and stupid. Every such change in the meaning of the words makes more difficult both the communication with people from distant places, where the meaning changes have not arrived yet, and the understanding of the older writings accumulated during the last centuries, many of which are much more valuable than it is expected by those who read only what was published last year, thinking that the older publications are obsolete. In fact too many recent research papers reinvent things that are decades old, because their authors have not read the old literature.
This change in terminology has been completely random, one could have equally well chosen to use "signs" instead of "subjective symptoms" and "symptoms" instead of "objective symptoms".
So there is no way for someone who has not studied the recent medical terminology to guess what medical doctors mean when they speak about "signs" and "symptoms".
If the author of this terminology would have invented some new words, e.g. "obsyms" and "subsyms", then at least their use would not have caused confusions. Any listeners would have recognized them as unknown words and would have asked for their meaning.