One of the things I really like about the name of this blog is that I first came across this term in a psychiatry lecture. As you may know “loosening of associations” is a sign in schizophrenia, which is actually a professional term used to describe someone with a thought disorder where associations of ideas become shortened and fragmented, commonly used in medical reports. Other signs in schizophrenia include “word salad” or “tangentially”. What I particularly find interesting is how descriptive such terms are, and in a way, they could be understood by a layman as well. For example, “word salad” could be metaphorical of having a lot of individual components jumbled up together: e.g. a few slices of cucumbers, a bit of lettuce, several pieces of roasted bacon, and some grated cheese all mashed up together. When this is used to describe someone’s speech, it is not difficult to get an impression that the content of speech is probably some sort of big mixture, that does not coherently stick together. This was when I began more curious about the origin of the terms “word salad” and “loosening of associations”.
With a bit of googling, I found that word salad was initially used in psychiatry “to describe the “nonsensical syntax of the mentally ill” (Word, 2019). It was first used by French psychiatrists. However, more interestingly, the phrase word salad was used by film critics in 1996 to describe Geoffrey Rush’s performance as the pianist in Shine, in which the character struggled with mental illness (Word, 2019). More recently, the term has been used in newspaper and magazines to describe lyrics, speeches and movie plots that appear as “nonsense”. Hence, now the term “word salad” is not only confined to describe a clinical sign by psychiatrists or doctors. Instead, it is becoming a more encompassing term in wider society. In a way, to some, my passage here could be perceived as a “word salad”. Such use allows these terminologies to be embedded in a more daily conversational manner. Will this have any implication on people’s perception of mental illnesses? Does it hence normalise psychiatric signs and symptoms? If so, what does such normalisation mean to psychiatric patients?
A different example of the use of medical terminologies on a day to day basis is the word “psycho”. “psycho” is sometimes casually used to describe someone who does bizarre, unusual, or unexpected things that may deviate from the social norm. I believe that to some extent, this forms part of people’s perception of people with “psychosis”, in which people probably have their own perception of what “psycho” means, and “sis” is a suffix that can denote an action, process, state or condition.
“Word salad” and “psycho” are only two examples that are particularly memorable to me, there are probably a lot more out there. I guess this is where the study of etymology comes in, in which the origin of words and how they have changed throughout history could be tied in with medicine. How interesting!
References
- Word Salad. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-salad.
loosened associations 