Episode Details

How does the meaning of words change over time - and what are the implications when those words are clinical terms? Nick Haslam is an academic psychologist, and his work has looked at the expansion of psychological terms like ‘trauma’, ‘abuse’ and ‘bullying’. He suggests that these concepts expand over time, becoming both less extreme (vertical expansion) and broader (horizontal expansion).

In this interview, we talk about how that applies to neurodiversity. We discuss how formal terms like ‘ADHD’ have expanded, but also how the emergence of informal terms like neurodivergence have increased the number of people who think that perhaps their difficulties in life are due to their differently wired brains. Nick is at pain to point out noting semantic shifts like this isn’t about judgement, it’s simply an observation. How we use words changes over time - and this has implications for clinical practice.

Nick is a prolific researcher and we have just selected a few, free-to-access examples of his work here.

Here’s a recent paper about concept creep.

Here is some of his work about the mixed blessings of biogenetic explanations.

Article in The Conversation about the way that the conversation on social media has shifted over time, with autism and ADHD now dominating.

Finally, the two papers by Lucy Foulkes and colleagues, mentioned by Dani and Nick, about the prevalence inflation hypothesis, and the Barry Mason paper about Safe Uncertainty.