Freak-out 13 June, 2009 at 5:52 am
In reference to the Wikipedia articles, Mental Breakdown / Nervous breakdown (typos, indignity and all):
“surveys of laypersons suggest that the term refers to a specific acute time-limited reactive disorder, involving symptoms of anxiety and depression, usually precipitated by external stressors” is complate bs. No layperson ever said that. Applying an apparently scientific description to “non-scientific” data is misleading at best. I would put it in a similar categorisation to the concept of a computer program having “a bug” in that the person saying so might realise that something is not right but having little or no concept of what is causing the problem (or more likely having little care to be bothered with what the particular problem may be).
This article should, in my opinion, be strictly reduced to a brief (non-scientific-sounding) description of the general idea of what the la(z)yperson’s understanding (or care-factor) is with a list of related articles, synonyms, etc. The current definition appears to be a straw poll of what the people around the water-cooler think it means, and having an “encyclopeadic” definition based on that is just lame. If the definition is based on such a straw poll, then the psych-science should show that.
-spxl
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