Wha…? People who make use of the common contextual usage of the term as reflected in the dictionary are being willfully ignorant, because it is insufficiently precise relative to how psychiatric clinicians use the term in describing behavior?
If laymen were pretending to be mental health professionals you might have a point, but most of the time this term is used by laymen to describe the behavior reflected in the dictionary definition, and not to prescribe meds or make a diagnosis. You are (IMO) being overly anal about the difference between the common contextual use of the term “anti-social” and how the psychiatric profession has chosen to specify it.
“Anti” means against, actively so, not just avoiding something. The definitions you quoted prove that too, unless you purposefully ignore that vast majority of what it says and concentrate oin only one word in one meaning instead of the full phrase. It’s not just that you don’t follow psychology terms properly, you also apparently can’t understand what the dictionary says or follow along with what the common word prefixes mean. I think you are assuming that because you think it can encompass being shy, that a reasonably intelligent person would think so also.
And people use “conversion” to mean changing something from one form to another, when it’s a specific psychological disorder with a specific meaning! “Conversion Disorder”: look it up in the DSM, folks!
Psychologists appropriated the extant term ‘anti-social’ and started using it in a very narrowly-defined way apart from its general usage. That’s normal for most fields; normal terms take specific meanings relative to the needs of the people working in the field. That doesn’t mean that established usages outside the field are suddenly wrong. Don’t be stupid.
And linguists far smarter than you or I have discussed the phrase “could care less” to death; it may give you a hard-on to claim that you’re right and others are wrong, but language is something people create by using it. If you have a stick up your ass about usages that you understand perfectly well, you’re gonna be left with high blood pressure. And since “could care less” is about equally common with “couldn’t care less” in usage, according to what I’ve read, than any rational person applying the simplist sort of empirical thought could determine that it’s a perfectly reasonable usage.
I suspect you’re the one who needs a contextual lesson. Since you apparently need more citations here’s another one from dictionary.com. Most lay people would not use the word “anti-social” to describe moderately shy people, but could quite probably (and correctly) use it to describe extremely shy people who actively shun the society of others, but without being antagonistic, borderline sociopaths per the more clinical uses of the term.
The dictionary defintions plainly lay this out as a valid contextual use. Why is this such a stumper for you?
an·ti·so·cial ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nt-sshl, nt-)
adj.
Shunning the society of others; not sociable.
Hostile to or disruptive of the established social order; marked by or engaging in behavior that violates accepted mores: gangs engaging in vandalism and other antisocial behavior.
Antagonistic toward or disrespectful of others; rude.
This is something that aggravated the hell out of me in Stephen King’s Dark Tower books. His character Susannah, previously Odetta/Detta, is always referred to as a schizophrenic, when in reality she has two disparate personalities. Now, maybe that’s called Multiple Personality Disorder, and maybe it’s called Dissociative Identity Disorder, but it sure as shit ain’t schizophrenia. You’d think Stephen King (and his editos and many pre-publication readers) would know that. :mad:
Now that I’m on the subject, what exactly is the difference between MPD and DID? Or is it just a semantic change?
I’ll agree that many of the older generation punters confuse schizophrenia with MPD, but that is because in their unenlightened day the terms were considered synonymous, at least in the popular sense.
However, in relation to this particular whinge:
…I’d really like to see some cites, thanks. (My bolding of course).
I find it an absolute rarity nowadays for anybody with half a brain to use schizophrenia and MPD interchangeably, and especially so in the media. Don’t you think the editorial staff might jump up and down about the errors, even if the writer might have been dumb enough to write them? The public awareness of schizophrenia is at an all-time high (and thankfully so IMO) so I seriously challenge your bitch-session here Ronnie.
Did you see my post right above yours about Stephen King? He definitely should know better, but it’s a mistake he’s made throughout his otherwise fabulous Dark Tower series. Yeah, you’d think his editors would correct this, but thus far, they haven’t. It’s quite aggravating.
OK…you’ve cited Stephen King, but he doesn’t have half a brain, so my assertion still stands.
Find me “countless prestige writers” and show me in reputable and professional magazines and other media outlets where the use of schizophrenia is errant.
Ah, this is the Pit, so to your Stephen King dis I will issue a resounding “bite me!” He won the National Book Award, and is a damn sight better than some of the dreck that gets on the Best Seller List. In any case, we’re talking about some really popular books that have this error in them.
Some misuses I’ve found in a basic web search on the term:
As you can see, some of these folks should know better but still use the word to mean “having multiple, disparate personalities.” We’re talking CBS news, among other media sources here. I think it’s safe to say that, in popular palance, “schizophrenic” is elided with MPD.
How so? The OP states that the general public is misusing a perfectly good term of art (antisocial) and that the general public is debasing the word created by shrinks. The problem is that the word existed before it was appropriated by the mental-health profession. As proof of this, I point to the fact that the definition is unchanged over 70 years. The MHP has no particular claim on the word; it isn’t a “psychiatric term” in the sense that e.g. anal-retentive or passive-aggressive are. I completely fail to see how laymen, using a term not invented by a field, are incorrect when they use the term in a way not blessed by the people who stole the word from them. This is not analogous to the wide-spread morphing of a word through popular usage, as in the case of ‘gay’, but rather a person showing up and stating that his small and insular group has decided the word has a specific meaning and that people who use the extant meaning are wrong.
I’d be interested in hearing how the two situations are analogous.
AFAIK, there’s no difference. Dissociative Identity is the preferred term nowadays; Multiple Personality has gone by the wayside for whatever reason. To continue the hijack, what’s the consensus on DID right now? I’d heard that there were significant doubts about a lot of the diagnosed cases, but I could be way off-base here.
That’s correct-- MPD was updated to DID in the DSM-III Revised (or perhaps the DSM-IV).
I believe that DID replaced MPD, because the term “dissociative” aptly describes the cognitive processes of patients who suffer from the disorder. Basically, each identity is separate from another, without any shared thoughts, etc.; just like separate people.
I hate it when perfectly good clinical tems get hijacked by an ill informed public. I hope “anti-social” can be saved. Sadly, many perfectly useful clinical terms such as idiot, moron, imbecile, and spastic are now beyond redemption. The Horror.
“Insanity” is not a psychological term. It is only a legal term. If someone is declared “legally insane”, they are just that; they have not necessarily been diagnosed with some kind of mental disorder.
EXACTLY. I hate it when I have been using a word incorrectly too. But we’re all just human, and all of us do it. Okay, so the OP was a wee bit stuffy about it. So? This is the pit. I’m all for his statement that we’re here to “fight ignorance”.
Let’s NOT do the “well, that’s the way we’ve always done it, and it says so in the dictionary” thing. That’s just contributing to the dumbing down of America, not expecting the best from people, and then just complacently allowing words being used incorrectly to suddenly be correct (even though they’re not), just because “everybody does it”.
Why SHOULDN’T people know and use the terms correctly? Why get all insulted if you find out you haven’t been using it correctly? Why shouldn’t we strive to raise ourselves to better standards, rather than just “go with the flow” correct or not?
There’s nothing “sudden” about it. The word “antisocial” has always been used as a synonym for “unsociable”. If someone speaking in a psychiatric context used the word in such a way it could fairly be considered a misuse, but in everyday conversation it is not. Nor is it inappropriate to use the word “narcissistic” to mean “egotistical” or “histrionic” to mean “theatrical”, even though these words have been borrowed by the mental health field to describe specific personality disorders.
Yes, why are people getting so upset about the fact that “antisocial” isn’t strictly a psychiatric term, that it was not coined by psychiatrists, and that it has a perfectly acceptable common meaning that is different from the psychiatric definition of antisocial personality disorder?
Two psychiatrists were walking down a hall and one psychiatrist said to the other psychiatrist “Hello”, and the other psychiatrist said “Hmmm, I wonder what he meant by that.”
