This is the title of an Editorial in the October 2017 BJPsych Bulletin. It is a personal view by Dr Philip Timms a retired Consultant Psychiatrist.
Dr Timms gave two pages of examples. I was interested in his selection as to me many of these terms were part of a system of language that has developed across medicine rather than related specifically to mental health.
Each of us would produce a different list. I would have included words like anosognosia, insight, capacity, subjective, objective, disorder etc
However I have chosen two examples as selected and defined by Dr Timms in his Devil’s Dictionary:
