Are psychiatric case notes offensive?

Learning points from paper

• Psychiatric information and terminology may simply be intrinsically more sensitive than medical information. For instance, whereas patients and professional raters found the formulation “chronic schizophrenic” to be offensive, the same reviewers did not take offense at the formulation “chronic diabetic” or “known case of SLE.”

Critique of paper

Instructions (to be deleted): Explain any problems with the paper's methods or findings

Other comments

Reviewed in The effects of promoting patient access to medical records: a review.

Citation and Abstract

Psychiatr Bull 1992;16:675–677. Are psychiatric case notes offensive? Crichton P, Douzenis A, Leggatt C, Hughes T.