John Launer: Words I want to ban

Which words or phrases would you like to see disappear from doctors’ vocabulary? I’d nominate three: “lacking insight,” “in denial,” and “manipulative.” For me, they all smack of moral judgment masquerading as diagnosis.Let’s start with “lacking insight.” Although it carries a vague impression of psychiatric precision, it often means simply that the patient isn’t seeing things the same way as their doctor. It avoids two uncomfortable truths. One is that we all probably lack insight in someone else’s eyes (often the patient’s) but would feel deeply affronted if they said so. The other is that the term is an easy alternative to trying to understand what motivates the other person—for example, that they drink alcohol or take drugs to cope with a state of mind they’d otherwise find hard to bear. It also makes a generalised or global claim about someone, an error that some people call “essentialist”: in other…
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