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A Devil's dictionary for mental health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Philip Timms
Philip Timms*
Affiliation:
King's College London
*
[email protected]
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Summary

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Clinical psychiatry, for all its emphasis on scientific rigour, is mediated mainly by words rather than by numbers. As with other professional areas, it has developed its own set of jargon words and phrases. Many of these are not the technical terms traditionally seen as jargon, but standard English words and phrases used in an idiosyncratic way. They therefore go unnoticed as jargon, while enfeebling our communications. I have used the template of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary to highlight some examples, with the aim of helping us all to talk, write and, perhaps, think more clearly.

Type
Editorials
Information
BJPsych Bulletin , Volume 41 , Issue 5 , October 2017 , pp. 244 - 246
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Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an open-access article published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Authors

Footnotes

Declaration of interest P.T. runs occasional writing courses for the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Public Engagement Committee, as part of their advanced communications module.

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