I'm not asking people to use terminology correctly in every instance. Not at all.
The words 'schizophrenic', 'bipolar', 'manic' etc are all misused - sometimes, like today, in my workplace. I'm not going to get exercised over that.
hahaha. hahaha!
It's not a matter of "correctly" or "incorrectly".
You're right, those terms are all misused. However, they have valid meanings outside psychiatry, and those meanings are different to the psychiatric meanings.
Take "schizophrenic". Schizophrenia is a term used in psychiatry to refer to a cluster of symptoms which, it is believed have some unifying factor, as the symptoms (delusions, confusion, paranoia, etc) are frequently "co-morbid". Back in the bad old days, there was a theory that people thus afflicted had some sort of split in their mind (hence the name; schizo is etymologically related to the word schism, i.e. a split or division). Modern psychiatry (AFAICT) no longer gives credence to that that "split personality" notion.
But the word "schizophrenic" took on a life all it's own beyond the strict psychiatric sense. In everyday language, we can use the word simply to mean "showing markedly inconsistent or self-contradictory behaviour". So one day I can be on EADD and nice as pie, being lovely to everyone and making friends. Then the next I might come on to EADD and call everyone a cunt and unfairly hand out infractions left, right and centre. If I did that, people might call me "schizophrenic". The would not be wrong! They would be correct. They wouldn't be using the word in it's psychiatric sense, they would be using it in it's vulgar sense.
Admittedly, not everyone is fully conscious all the time of how words have this "schizophrenic" nature, so people do get confused. I get confused by it. But since I came to accept that the English language is ambiguous and it's words are "schizophrenic" in the vernacular sense, I am less likely to get in a pickle
Bipolar: have bipolar magnets here... ok this is less commonly used out side the psychiatric meaning, but it can be used to mean other things.
Manic: A specific psychiatric mood "disorder". But also, "frantically busy; hectic.". Neither meaning is incorrect, they are simply two different senses of the word.
I think you're just describing sloppy use of the language, if we are talking about someone’s mental state and we use the word 'Depression' then I would take that to mean that that person is suffering from Depression.
No it's not sloppy, though I can see how it can be perceived as sloppy. But it's really just down to this English language having words with multiple senses. It's a confusing language.
Depression and it's different senses; they're in the Oxford English Dictionary. Are they sloppy? Look the word up! OK you might not have one but I do.
OED said:
depression, noun
1. ASTRONOMY etc. Angular distance below the horizon or a horizontal plane.
2. Defeat, suppression, degradation (now rare or obsolete)
3. Dejection, melancholy, low spirits. (b) MEDICINE A pathological state of excessive melancholy, characterized by a mood of hopelessness, with feelings of inadequacy, and sometimes physical symptoms.
4. Lowering in physical position
...
So the psychiatric term is actually a specialisation of one sense of the word (3b).
The OED meanings are listed chronologically, oldest first. So it's first use was in astronomy, then later it came to mean defeat, then later "dejection, melancholy", and this sense was picked up by psychiatrists who used it as a label for a set of symptoms.
Just because psychiatrists are professionals and experts, doesn't mean they can take words and stop them being used in whatever way they were used beforehand.
Pedantic, accurate, all a matter of perspective
