They did it again!

Being a recovering member of the legal profession, I will be the first to admit that lawyers and judges have been known to be overly free with the English language, using it in perverse manners that normal humans would never dream of.  So, coming from that starting point, I can appreciate all too well that psychiatry, psychology and mental health care providers are just as guilty of these crimes as are legal types.

From what I can tell, these strange usages seem to come and go in cycles.  Back a number of years ago, I regularly encountered the phrase “verbally violent.”  I stopped seeing that phrase shortly after a psychiatrist on cross examination admitted that “verbal violence” was an alternative way of describing someone who is loud and quarrelsome.

A few years later, I kept on encountering descriptions of patients as being simultaneously catatonic and homicidal. I didn’t think that made too much sense, so I kept asking psychiatrists testifying while using that phrase to explain it.  Slowly but surely, I may have managed to put that non sequitur to bed, perhaps in a catatonic state.

This past week, I came across another phrase that beats the ones described above for being both contradictory and opaque at the same time.  The offending phrase was “positive suicidal ideation.”  Does this mean that suicidal ideation is sometimes positive and sometimes negative?  Isn’t suicidal ideation by its very nature negative?  I’m positive that the phrase means nothing to me!