Popular language is fond of the words of psychiatry. Words that we also use a little wrongly and through. The reason is quite simple: psychiatry has created words to label what are called personality disorders. Difficult to understand, they have been hijacked…
Psychiatrists have thus defined a dozen personality types to which each of us is likely to relate. So the modern world, very fond of psychiatry, delighted in reading these descriptions to adapt them, a little quickly, and abuse them in popular language, far from their medical definition. And today that criminal news puts the discourse of experts in the public square, understanding is not always there… So a little mistrust and you quickly become “paranoid”. Which is not a “good” name, because paranoia is a pathological mistrust. Smiling if it weren’t a terrible disease, we could define the paranoid as the one who, when he watches the rugby players get into the fray, will immediately think: “Hey, they’re still going to talk about me”. So if your husband wants to know where you had lunch at noon, he’s not “paranoid”… just suspicious or jealous.
Another example, the maniac… In popular language, it’s someone who tidies up his office too well or who pampers his car on weekends. Maniacal ? No, just meticulous. The maniac is in psychiatry a serious form of depressive, so nothing to do…
Take the schizo, it is not the somewhat distant guest at a meal with friends, but an isolated individual, indifferent to praise or criticism who, precisely, lives without friends, in almost total social isolation. Another buzzword: compulsive! Is he excited about work or his passions? It is in psychiatry more complex than that. The compulsive is a perfectionist whose, for example, difficulties in completing a job are almost insurmountable. Not the simple enemy of the beetles but the notable waverer, the one who has a madness of doubt, a high moral standard and an excessive rigidity about ethical questions. There are undoubtedly some teenagers who will now know how to redefine their fathers…
In fact, like all medical disciplines, extremely precise definitions. But it is a fact that the words of psychiatry are very fashionable, and it is a pity for the sole pleasure of a good word to divert their precision… or else it must be done for all areas of medicine. And say of a person who blushes: “it’s too vascularized”, or to invite a friend to dinner: “come to my place to have your temporo-maxillary joints massaged”.
Doctor Jean-Francois Lemoine
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