[From Technical Terminology to Prejudicial Plattitudes - A Cognitive Analysis of Jargon in Psychiatric Institutions].

Within psychiatric institutions it is common to label psychiatric patients with a broad array of technical terms from different domains. However, through their nonreflective usage technical terms gradually become "fuzzy" in content, enriched with normative evaluations and finally reificated as "real" entities. This evolvement of meaning may foster a schematic and biased understanding of mental patients, threaten the validity of psychiatric diagnoses and negatively influence the therapeutic process. Becoming familiar with the underlying cognitive mechanisms, frequent supervision and the provision of context factors that permit the development of a close therapeutic alliance can help to alleviate these potential dangers to efficient psychiatric therapy.