Thread by @drlouisehansen

Inaccurate or Misleading Psychological and Psychiatric Terms to Avoid:
Medical model. Although many authors who invoke the term “medical model” presume that it refers to a single conceptualization (e.g., Mann and Himelein, 2008), it does not. 1/16

Some authors insist that the term is so vague and unhelpful that we are better off without it (Meehl, 1995). Among other things, it has been wielded by various authors to mean (a) the assumption of a categorical rather than dimensional model of psychopathology; 2/16

(b) an emphasis on underlying “disease” processes rather than on presenting signs and symptoms; (c) an emphasis on the biological etiology of psychopathology; (d) an emphasis on pathology rather than on health; 3/16

(e) the assumption that mental disorders are better treated by medications and other somatic therapies than by psychotherapy;
(f) the assumption that mental disorders are better treated by physicians than by psychologists; or (g) the belief that mentally ill individuals 4/16

who engage in irresponsible behavior are not responsible for such behavior (see Blaney, 1975, 2015, for discussions). Similar semantic and conceptual ambiguities bedevil the term “disease model” when applied to addictions and psychological conditions (e.g., Graham, 2013). 5/16

Underlying biological dysfunction. In this era of the increasing biologization of psychology and psychiatry (Satel and Lilienfeld, 2013), authors may be tempted to assume that biological variables, such as parameters of brain functioning, “underlie” psychological phenomena. 6/16

Nevertheless, conceptualizing biological functioning as inherently more “fundamental” than (that is, causally prior to) psychological functioning, such as cognitive and emotional functioning, is misleading (Miller, 1996). 7/16

The same inferential limitation applies to many similar phrases, such as “biological bases of behavior,” “brain substrates of mental disorder,” and “neural underpinnings of personality” (Miller, 1996). 8/16

Autism epidemic. Enormous effort has been expended to uncover the sources of the “autism epidemic” (e.g., King, 2011), the supposed massive increase in the incidence and prevalence of autism, now termed autism spectrum disorder, over the past 25 years. 9/16

The causal factors posited to be implicated in this “epidemic” have included vaccines, television viewing, dietary allergies, antibiotics, and viruses. Nevertheless, there is meager evidence that this purported epidemic reflects a genuine increase in the rates of autism 10/16

per se as opposed to an increase in autism diagnoses stemming from several biases and artifacts, including heightened societal awareness of the features of autism (“detection bias”), growing incentives for school districts to report autism diagnoses, 11/16

and a lowering of the diagnostic thresholds for autism across successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Gernsbacher et al., 2005; Lilienfeld and Arkowitz, 2007). When the diagnostic criteria for autism were held constant, 12/16

the rates of this disorder remained essentially constant between 1990 and 2010 (Baxter et al., 2015). If the rates of autism are increasing, the increase would appear to be slight at best, hardly justifying the widespread claim of an “epidemic.” 13/16

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.” (Confucius, The Analects) 14/16

Source: Lilienfield, S., Sauvigne, K., Lynn, K., Cautin, R, Latzman, R., & Waldman, I. (2015). Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases. 15/16

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