SINGAPORE: As a junior medical officer, one of my main duties was writing for senior doctors when they interviewed patients. Trying to keep up with him, we often truncated long words. This included diagnoses. For example, instead of writing cerebrovascular accident, we would use acronyms like CVA.
Similarly, in my first psychiatric publication, other trainees and I often replaced schizophrenia with “Schiz” when writing notes. Over time, the use of such abbreviations became common, leading us to use these terms when communicating the diagnosis verbally.
It wasn’t long before this drew attention and, unsurprisingly, drew the ire of our senior psychiatrists at the hospital.
In that lost era when medical audits weren’t the be all and end all, our seniors were upset with us for using short forms like “Schiz,” whether written or verbal, not because they feared we’d fail an audit . but because it was disrespectful to do so.
We learned that as mental health providers, we must respect the illnesses we treat and, more so, the patients who are working under the immense debilitation of these unfortunate illnesses.
Some shrugged off terminology issues as unimportant and instead blamed senior doctors for being “anal.”
I, however, accepted the reasoning and have since joined the ranks of gray-haired psychiatrists. Having been trained to use psychiatric diagnoses in the strictest and most precise way, it is often extremely shocking to hear that the public uses them lightly.
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