Vocabulary, not diagnosis. Clinical terms describe patterns a trained person assesses over time, with your history in front of them \u2014 they aren't checklists to apply to yourself or anyone else. Knowing the words is for describing experience accurately and reading claims critically.
What you'd probably say, and the term for it. Psychology's vocabulary is the most borrowed and most mangled of any field on this shelf \u2014 which is exactly why having it straight is worth something.
Psychology studies behavior and mind at every scale, from a single neuron's contribution to a whole organization's culture. The branches barely overlap in method.
The working vocabulary. The last group \u2014 how to read a psychology claim \u2014 is the one that protects you from the other fifteen tools' worth of confident nonsense.
Clinical words that have escaped into everyday speech. What people usually mean, what the term actually denotes, and why the gap matters.