Psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid

It 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.

Looks like Psychologists came up with something as complicated as the human mind. I found this very strange:

Symptom: (under Oxymorons) (41) Observable symptom. This term, which appears in nearly 700 manuscripts according to Google Scholar, conflates signs with symptoms. Signs are observable features of a disorder; symptoms are unobservable features of a disorder that can only be reported by patients (Lilienfeld et al., 2013; Kraft and Keeley, 2015). Symptoms are by definition unobservable.

I am surprised that English medicine seems to differentiate observability here since I never heard it expressed in that way. Seems to make sense to differentiate though, psychologists probably know best why this data maybe needs a different evaluation.

there are three pillars of communication in action at once here, it seems.. one is the accepted technical language of the trained, credentialed specialist; second is the common language used daily to navigate our personal lives; third might be the language used in public discourse, in the media, and in a classroom to non-specialists..

The high-effort piece of writing adds citation-based examples of semi-specialist wording.. like someone that is a credentialed school counselor, but is not in the health professions per-se. Well guess what, you now have religious schools and also splinter educational environments to deal with as your audience.. good luck with that, Science is not going to settle cultural commitments in all cases. nor should it, I will argue.

Psychology has always been seen as a pseudo-science in some corners, unlike hard sciences backed by math. This well-intentioned and somewhat urgent writing tries to corral the "three pillars of communication" listed above, and as usual, will only get so far IMHO ..

I think there's a difference between police-ing speech, and clarifying it. Language is hard, and misunderstandings are surprisingly common, and many world's evils comes from pure misunderstanding.

Most misunderstandings arise from people having different understanding of same words - so approaching agreement on the meaning of words is important to reduce misunderstandings. The problem is the language is self-manifesting - the word gains the meaning from the way people use it, even when the meaning differs from the original (perhaps academic or technical) meaning.

So one side has to stand back - either academia (in this case, psychiatry), or the general population. Since academia largely relies on solid, defined meanings of words, while the general population relies on "how other people are currently using it", it's supposed to be easier to change the usage by the general population. Although it's pretty hard to do both ways.

Otherwise, we end up with words having two distinct meanings, one professional, and other layman.

What do others here think about casual use of the word "crazy" in a work setting. For instance, "that's a crazy idea" or "they're crazy to think ...."