[johannbok]

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.

[xmddmx]

"Psych PhDs generally don't do frontline stuff"

Ok, to be fair, I did roll my eyes at a few of their terms. However, you are mostly arguing out of scope/training.

Psychiatrists are not researchers, they are MDs.

They are generally pretty smart people, and I admire their work.

But MDs have next to zero formal training in research, methodology, or statistics, and even fewer have taken courses in the theory or philosophy of science or knowledge.

That's why MD/PhD programs exist, or MPh degrees, so the MDs can learn how to do research properly.

[lofatdairy]

Yeah I don't disagree that the article does have a nitpicky streak. However, since it's in the service of having a higher standard in publishing, I don't think it's useless, except in the sense that it dilutes the more useful recommendatios.

Speaking from my own experience, a lot of the statistical and clichéd methdological phrases also appear in some lower-quality biology papers I've seen, and it's mistakes I see grad students make and even submitters make. The fact that the authors can point to thousands of google scholar hits shows that the paper is addressing a real issue and was a worthwhile endeavor. If anything, this is what I feel more commenters should have criticized. Not that it appears in the paper, but that the state of the field is such that the familiarity with statistics (and I argue math, history, philosophy, etc) is so poor that such inaccurate language is so frequently deployed.

I can't speak to how this relates to practice, especially with regards to psychiatric practice. Quite frankly I was less concerned with that than the obsession with the sign/symptom distinction that's both commonplace and useful, and the weird attempts to preserve phrases like "steep learning curve" when what's being criticized is actually the lack of specificity the phrase encodes.

[hitekker]

> 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.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

<< from article: Chemical imbalance

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?

[phs318u]

Perhaps it's targeted at psych professionals in respect of their discussions with non-psych professionals e.g. patients and their families.