Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles

To-do list

• Add advice on how to incorporate the psychological, emotional, and social effects of health problems into articles.
  • should be infused throughout
  • may need some subsections, e.g., reaction to a life-threatening diagnosis
  • I support this one—and not just because I'm a psychologist! ;-) ... We have had discussion about this topic before. Let's link to such archived discussions, e.g., this one from 2008. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 14:36, 5 May 2021 (UTC)
• Add advice on how to present costs.
  • accuracy ("the wholesale list price in Ruritania in 2017 according to Alice", not "the price")
  • WP:MEDMOS2020 results
  • any recommended metrics, such as cost effectiveness, cost per DALY averted,[1] etc.
• Add statement about gender-neutral language.
  • Avoid unexpected neutrality for subjects very strongly associated with one biological sex (e.g., pregnancy, menstruation, and ovarian cancer affect "women"[2]; prostate cancer and orchiditis affect "men") but encourage gender neutrality for all others (e.g., heart disease)?
  • Defer to MOS for any individual person.
• Reading levels
• How to talk about suicide-related content (e.g., the "committed" RFC)
  • I've added a statement about the word "commit", and alternative phrasings. Bibeyjj (talk) 12:10, 28 October 2021 (UTC)
• Clarify how to include "evolution" in anatomy articles (suggest under "Development" subheading). Bibeyjj (talk) 18:52, 6 October 2021 (UTC)
• (Your idea here)

What to do with this to-do list?

It's not clear to me if the above "To-do list" is a WikiProject Medicine effort, i.e., something we, as a WikiProject, have decided (via consensus) to establish, or if it was one (unidentified) editor's idea, or something else. Can someone clarify? Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 03:51, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

This is a collection of items that various conversations and disputes have indicated (a) it might be helpful for MEDMOS to address but (b) exactly what the consensus is or how to address the subject in MEDMOS will require further discussion.

Any editor is welcome to add a suggested topic to the list. It doesn't have to be a subject that you personally care about or relates to an article you were editing. Please add enough context that we can figure out what your subject is later.

If you feel ready to address one of the topics, then please start a new ==section== at the end of the page to ask a question or make a proposal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:53, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Please don't start discussions in this section. Please do add links to prior discussions and examples or other details that you think will be helpful (signed or not, as you choose) when we have the real discussions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:35, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Possessives in condition names

There seems to be at least a vague consensus both on- and off-site to avoid possessives in names of conditions, i.e. that Down's syndrome and Asperger's syndrome are now an obsolete style. I know I have encountered advice to this effect in multiple offsite style guides, and it's weird to me that MOS:MED doesn't cover it. I'm also occasionally running into article titles like Milroy's disease which seem like they should move, but there's not an entirely clear basis on which to RM them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:46, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Previous discussions have suggested that this may be an WP:ENGVAR issue, with British English preferring the non-possessive and American English using the possessive.

Also, @Asto77 may be interested in this, based on the suggestion in Talk:Sjögren syndrome#Article name needs to change surely? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:04, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

As someone from the UK, I've never heard of any British preference. For example I think you'll have trouble finding any UK site mentioning Alzheimer's disease without the 's. I've always maintained this is a pronunciation thing where the difficulty of clearly distinguishing the 's in a term where the second word begins with an 's' (Like "Down's syndrome") means it gets dropped in speech. Some people then rationalise this with invented ideas like Down never had his syndrome so how can he own it. Well, I think, if you are so upset with Down's "ownership" then call it trisomy 21 and do away with the owner. Dropping the 's doesn't change the fact that it is some guy's name.

As the linked discussion notes, when people drop the second word and say that someone has Asperger's or has Down's or has Alzheimer's then magically the possessive is universal. Try finding someone who says they "have Asperger" or were "diagnosed with Asperger". Doesn't work. (Of course Asperger's is a legacy diagnosis anyway, in a small way due to not wanting to be associated with this person).

I think this is a good example of a dispute where editors should agree there are more important things for them to do and argue about and leave it to some international committee to decide. I think the current text for our article titles is good advice. If multiple forms of a name are in use without a very clear direction of travel, then find an authority and agree to follow that. -- Colin°^Talk 11:29, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. One advantage of "finder" names is that they are far more memorable, at least for the general public, than the usually rather longer proper scientific name. Johnbod (talk) 14:45, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the post was about whether to use an eponym or a technical name, but just whether we include the 's in the eponymous name. Technical names aren't always a direct substitute for eponyms, as sometimes they find that the eponymous name has more than one cause, and the disease gets split, or that several eponyms are the same disease. But again I think this sort of argument is best left to committees, making it "somebody else's problem".

There is some commentary on this issue at List of eponymous diseases. As with many things in science, often the person who gets all the credit wasn't always the first. -- Colin°^Talk 09:09, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

We arguably touch on it where the MOS mentions the ICD as one source of reconciling title disputes for med articles. Whilst I've updated the MOS to refer to ICD-11; WHO began dropping the 's from some code descriptions as far back as the 2010 version of ICD-10. Little pob (talk) 15:42, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

So far, I'm finding a) no evidence this is an ENGVAR matter, and various US publishers and medical organizations advising against the possessive (plus considerable RS evidence that to the extent there's a national/continental lean on the matter, it is exactly the opposite of that claimed above); and b) general opposition to the possessive in international and national (including US) professional bodies in the field, which is by no means recent but dating back at least as far as the 1970s. The US National Insititutes of Health (inluding the National Library of Medicine) has opposed possessive usage since 1974, the Canadian National Institutes of Health since 1975, the World Health Organization in since 2004 (including in its International Classification of Diseases), and the American Medical Association since 2007 (including in their AMA Manual of Style at § 3.2.22). Scientific Style and Format, one of the style guides our MoS is actually based on, is against the possessive. Various publishers are making to no-possessive rule part of their style guides, e.g. Journal of Medical Internet Research[3], Applied Radiology [4], etc., including many Springer Nature journals apparently (according to editing service AJE.com [5]; I haven't gone digging in all the individual journal style sheets and submission guidelines). Also Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary since 2011, and Stedman's Medical Dictionary are against the possessive use. See also medical information projects essentially aligned with WP's goals, like the radiology-focused Radiopaedia [6], and Eponymictionary [7] which consistently avoid the possessive form (though WhoNamedIt veers back and forth between styles [8] like WP presently does, including cases like "Münchhausen's syndrome" that do not comport with actual usage [9]). Encyclopaedia Britannica has gone non-possessive [10], including with terms that WP is still putting a -'s on unnecessarily. Also anti-possessive are the American College of Clinical Pharmacy [11] and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [12]. The shift appears to have started over 70 years ago with the founding of the the National Down Syndrome Society without the "Down's" that then dominated in common practice, and it was no accident. Statistical analysis of modern papers in PubMed show the -'s forms to be rapidly disappearing from professional literature [13] (in American ones faster than in European).

Editorials against the possessive are pretty common, e.g. the one already cited above and [14][15][16][17] (though two [18][19] I have not yet found full-text access to, including via WP:TWL). There are also some polemical counter-essays that rely on traditionalism notions or appeals to what non-medical writers prefer, e.g. this one which only cares what general-audience dictionaries like, and this one with right-wing dogwhistling like "a really silly example of political correctness run amok" (despite this not being a political question); another here includes some rationale why Pascal's principle and similar terms for eponymous laws, procedures, devices, and so on, should still be possessive (though it tries to over-apply this to non-parallel cases like diseases, syndromes, and other conditions), but also concludes with a similar rant against gender-neutrality and in favor of traditionalism and against the natural process of language change. Some essay and other material on this subject is simply neutrally observational that both styles exist but that their conflict/inconsistency is problematic in various ways: [20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Most dictionaries are very slow to produce new editions or otherwise update their material (though most of those updated within the last generation or so include both possessive and non-possessive forms for the conditions with names commonly encountered in everyday English), and some general-audience style guides are as also slow to update. But the Associated Press Stylebook (dominant guide for American news writing) has made the no-possessive switch. I've not yet checked Mosby's Medical Dictionary or Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary yet, nor gone over various other mainstream style guides on this question, like Chicago and New Hart's/Oxford current edition; Chicago 16th preferred no possessive, but also said that the possessive form "may be preferred in a general context" (§ 8.143).

So, regarding actual medical usage, "leave it to some international committee to decide .... best left to committees, making it 'somebody else's problem'" essentially has already happened for almost exactly 50 years, with a now generally dominant no-'s result (though some terms seem more resistant to it) that has become our problem. The fact that it was discussed before, some time ago, on WP doesn't mean it should never be discussed again nor emerge with a clear resolution to say something about it in MOS:MED. A literal "some international committee" is basically a red herring: "there is no central body regulating the use of [medical] eponyms. Any changes in designation or use thus must reflect a naturally occurring, emerging, and broadly based consensus ... in effect a reflection of a decision by a [medical] 'court' of opinion." [27]. While not every journal and other medical publisher is in exact agreement on this (and actually British ones that retain the possessive are more common that American ones; so much for the "possessive is an Americanism" ENGVAR claim, also refuted here and here, citing multiple sources), and the decline rate in possessive form of one syndrome versus another is not constant [28], it's clear that the possessive usage has greatly declined since the 1970s. At what point is all of this evidence of a shift, at least within literature competent on the subject, "enough"? I'm often critical of attempts to impose specialist-source writing conventions on Wikipedia, but those concerns do not apply when the best-practice usage in such source material does not actually conflict with a non-specialist writing norm (e.g., we have no problem at all adopting the italics and capitalized-genus format for Homo sapiens and E. coli, nor the space-between-unit-figures-and-symbols standard, and standardized symbols, for 3 mm and 560 cu ft). Here, there is no particular norm but completely random usage in non-specialist sources; the avoidance of the possessive form will not be an "astonishment" for readers, and there is no compelling reason not to standardize (while there are good reasons to do so).

Using the shorter form on WP would not only better agree with the modern source material it would also align better with WP:CONCISE policy. There's also a WP:CONSISTENT argument to make: not only does using a possessive in a few "hold-out" cases like Milroy's disease and Parkinson's disease conflict with most such other articles, various terms of this sort (especially those named after multiple parties such as Tay–Sachs disease and Chédiak–Higashi syndrome) are virtually unattested in possessive form, so normalizing in the opposite direction would not actually be possible. Also, it's worth noting that the Austrlian Government Style Manual [29] draws a distinction we might find useful here, and which seems to encapsulate where the actual usage is going anyway: "If it is a disease named after people who had the disease, use the possessive case. Lou Gehrig's disease, Legionnaire's disease. If it is a disease or anatomical part named after the person who discovered, studied or described it, don't use the possessive case. Alzheimer disease, Down syndrome, Henle loop." And all the material in all the works agree that ones named after places (Ebola virus disease, St. Louis encephalitis, and Lyme disease) never take a possessive. Same with ones named metaphorically after historical, literary, or mythological figures (Marie Antoinette syndrome, Pickwick syndrome, Oedipus complex). PS: Some bodies and works (including Mendelian Inheritance in Man) go further, and suggest replacing all medical eponyms entirely (and there are published debates on the idea [30]), but this seems a bridge too far, especially for WP, which is bound to a pretty strong extent by WP:COMMONNAME. However, that is not a style policy, and whether to possessivize something would seem to be a style question (plus a redirect should always exist from the -'s form and from the curly -’s form as well).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:44, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

I think this is a good analysis, but I don't think it strikes at the core of the issue, which is that people (including editors) feel strongly about the Right™ Way, and if we pass a law on high that says all right-thinking editors will obviously want to do it our way, they won't. Sjögren syndrome has already been moved to the non-possessive twice, and there are complaints on the talk page about it using the "wrong" form. Down syndrome has been argued over since the second-ever comment on the talk page in 2004 (not to mention 1, 2, 3, 4 [the RM], 5, 6, and probably more), and despite having what you'd call the "right" answer, it does not appear to make people happy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:46, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

There are always "complaints ... about ... using the 'wrong' form", when it comes to every style issue and every style guide and every publication, and it never actually comes down to "right-thinking", which is just subjective preference. It is never a reason for a publication's style guide to fail to settle a glaring consistency problem one way or another, even arbitrarily, though in this case it's not arbitrary, as professional usage is strongly moving away from the possessive (for half a century now), and it's more concise anyway. If they only down side is "someone somewhere might not like it", that's always true of every such decision and never prevents us making the decision.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:46, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

You say "professional usage is strongly moving away from the possessive". Do you have any evidence for that, outside of "--- syndrome" disorders like Down's. The stats below show that really isn't true for the two "--- disease" conditions I looked at. Pretty much every article on the topic cites the National Down Syndrome Society's request to drop the possessive because "the syndrome does not actually belong to anyone". And any study of trends tends to pick Down's. There's never any other compelling reason given compared to all the other arguments we get about medical language being dehumanising or offensive or archaic or jargon.

It's a pretty weak argument. Consider if we are all at the beach and decide to skim stones. We look around and each pick one. WAID says "Colin's stone looks the best for skimming". We all skim the stones. I say "But WAID's stone did the most hops and went furthest". None of us owned the stones, and all of us lost the stones forever. They never belonged to us either, we just held them for mere seconds. We also might talk about Colin's employer or WAID's terrible journey to work on Monday. Those don't belong to us either.

I don't know why the Society isn't more concerned to use a proper name for the condition, rather than naming it after someone who thought "the Mongolian type of idiot" and "Mongolian defectives" was ok. Or get upset that so many conditions or parts of bodies are named after European white men. An 's doesn't change that. -- Colin°^Talk 12:24, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

About never prevents us making the decision:

First, yes, it does; see Wikipedia:Main Page design for many examples of "someone somewhere might not like it" stopping the Wikipedia community from making a decision.

Second, the Wikipedia community did make a decision, namely to follow the most popular choice in the sources rather than imposing standardization on a non-standardized reality. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:02, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Reading more on this I find this post which refers to Webster's dictionary for explanation of how some grammarians have "fooled" themselves over so-called possessive form. The dictionary gives examples of 's being used in situations where possession/ownership/belonging is not the purpose. For these diseases, the so-called possessive form is being used to indicate "named after", not ownership. They no more own their disease than "a week's pay" is owned by the week or the "land's end" belongs to the land. I really do think the argument that Down didn't own the disease is someone getting upset over exactly this misunderstanding, that 's only ever indicates possession.

I agree that there is pressure from WP:CONSISTENT to have a consistent grammatical form for eponymous diseases. Some style guides and publishers have decided that consistency is important, so it isn't a daft idea. But other publications are happy for articles and papers to be inconsistent in this regard so that isn't a daft idea either. On the other hand there is pressure from WP:COMMONNAME to pick the name most commonly used in our English-language reliable sources, per article. I don't think WP:CONCISE is seriously relevant at all, which is about whether to eliminate words, not punctuation, and no style guide is advocating for this on the grounds that it saves a letter and an apostrophe.

There's a practical issue for some articles. At our Parkinson's disease article, the word "Parkinson's" (without "disease") appears 43 times. At Alzheimer's disease, the word "Alzheimer's" (without "disease") appears 71 times. So it is extremely common for the text to use the shortened form, which simply does not work without a possessive.

Other examples of well known diseases (exact text in title/abstract in last 5 years):

• Ménière's disease 1064 vs Ménière's disease 165
• Huntington's disease 3946 vs Huntington disease 794
• I tried Graves' disease but PubMed seems to eliminate punctuation even in double-quotes so both results are the same. Expanding to show 10 pages of results and searching in my browser has "Graves' disease" at 177 and "Graves disease" at 15.

I see that the earlier linked Whose name is it anyway? Varying patterns of possessive usage in eponymous neurodegenerative diseases largely confirms my stats observations below, though their analysis ends in 2013. -- Colin°^Talk 18:56, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Stats

A PubMed search for article title + abstract text for exact string match. For example: "down's syndrome" in 1983.

Table of stats

Non-possessive vs Possessive Year Parkinson Parkinson's ratio Alzheimer Alzheimer's ratio Down Downs ratio 1983 14 181 12.9 24 156 6.5 62 157 2.5 1984 21 277 13.2 16 200 12.5 62 143 2.3 1985 17 270 15.9 20 316 15.8 94 145 1.5 1986 27 342 12.7 35 462 13.2 93 187 2.0 1987 33 491 14.9 36 499 13.9 125 176 1.4 1988 33 429 13.0 67 606 9.0 131 210 1.6 1989 53 538 10.2 77 870 11.3 151 211 1.4 1990 52 606 11.7 99 825 8.3 243 208 0.9 1991 41 673 16.4 102 955 9.4 170 228 1.3 1992 53 707 13.3 115 1,041 9.1 195 213 1.1 1993 61 764 12.5 145 1,128 7.8 212 252 1.2 1994 61 768 12.6 170 1,419 8.3 183 218 1.2 1995 61 931 15.3 191 1,460 7.6 247 229 0.9 1996 47 963 20.5 234 1,771 7.6 249 255 1.0 1997 93 1,181 12.7 308 1,856 6.0 246 199 0.8 1998 87 1,216 14.0 313 2,043 6.5 274 198 0.7 1999 123 1,344 10.9 309 2,016 6.5 321 207 0.6 2000 115 1,518 13.2 310 2,306 7.4 285 174 0.6 2001 123 1,484 12.1 323 2,355 7.3 391 182 0.5 2002 174 1,734 10.0 367 2,540 6.9 336 188 0.6 2003 209 2,023 9.7 395 2,629 6.7 364 156 0.4 2004 291 2,100 7.2 543 3,122 5.7 378 137 0.4 2005 347 2,146 6.2 590 3,323 5.6 460 130 0.3 2006 431 2,618 6.1 766 3,637 4.7 517 167 0.3 2007 456 2,845 6.2 687 3,772 5.5 533 139 0.3 2008 479 3,082 6.4 751 4,079 5.4 538 149 0.3 2009 578 3,306 5.7 832 4,450 5.3 524 132 0.3 2010 633 3,766 5.9 933 5,233 5.6 606 127 0.2 2011 631 4,135 6.6 882 5,611 6.4 668 119 0.2 2012 688 4,500 6.5 1,025 6,334 6.2 729 126 0.2 2013 786 4,869 6.2 1,081 6,875 6.4 792 144 0.2 2014 791 5,054 6.4 1,017 7,474 7.3 840 130 0.2 2015 890 5,534 6.2 1,022 7,918 7.7 789 105 0.1 2016 975 5,918 6.1 1,079 8,310 7.7 777 96 0.1 2017 993 6,234 6.3 1,172 8,930 7.6 822 81 0.1 2018 979 6,413 6.6 1,092 9,388 8.6 814 69 0.1 2019 953 6,807 7.1 1,166 10,103 8.7 828 78 0.1 2020 1,083 7,982 7.4 1,242 11,667 9.4 948 73 0.1 2021 1,035 8,805 8.5 1,186 13,055 11.0 1,064 95 0.1 2022 893 8,743 9.8 1,182 13,444 11.4 1,048 82 0.1 2023 873 8,575 9.8 1,112 14,177 12.7 980 78 0.1

Ratio of possessive vs non-possessive

These show that for PubMed article titles and abstracts:

• The possessive form of "Parkinson's disease" averaged around 13x more popular than "Parkinson disease" in the 80s an 90s then declined to 6x more popular in the 00s but has crept up again to be nearly 10x more popular in 2023.
• The possessive form of "Alzheimer's disease" had a peak of 16x more popular than "Alzheimer disease" in the mid 80s then declined to 4.7x more popular in the mid 00s but has crept up again to be nearly 13x more popular in 2023. (Not sure what was going on with the 1983 figure, which seems to be an anomaly).
• The possessive form of "Down's syndrome" in 1983 was about 2.5x more common than "Down syndrome" but declined to reach parity around 1996 and is currently about 12.5x less common.

Here are also the Ngram stats:

• Parkinson's
• Alzheimer's
• Down's

The ngram results show the possessive is way ahead of the non-possessive for all three conditions and the only chart showing some meaningful variation is the one for Down's syndrome where the possessive is becoming steadily less popular but still a long way to go.

Personally, I dislike searches like these as it is so easy to make mistakes or misinterpret the results. Please let me know if they are misinterpreted or incorrect. I remain unmoved from my position that the differences are almost entirely to do with pronunciation and uncertainty about how to form a possessive rather than invented reasons like whether the person had it or the doctor had it. Other examples mentioned above are Tay–Sachs, where the the second guy is called Sachs and very few people on planet Earth are sure how to make that possessive or enjoy saying it. And similarly, Chédiak–Higashi syndrome is a disease named after two people, and even fewer people on planet Earth are confident to make that possessive, and many might even assume it is a place name. The general trend with diseases is to avoid and sometimes replace those named after people or places. For example, Ebola would not get that name in 2023. Worrying about whether there's an apostrophe in a name that still clearly refers to the doctor/patient generates a remarkable amount of publications. Don't doctors have more important things to do, like treating patients?

SMcCandlish research contains a lot of useful links but there are two dozen sources cited, which disagree, most of which acknowledge this is an ongoing area of dispute. Consistency of article titles might be an argument for picking one style over another. It would be more persuasive if the usage patterns for possessive vs non-possessive, particularly for ...disease, were similar, or that there was a consistent trend away from the possessive for ...disease forms. But currently there's really no love for Parkinson disease or Alzheimer disease on either side of the Atlantic, and if anything, it is getting rarer. I wonder if this is a result of SEO practices when writing papers, that there's a strong pressure to pick the more popular search term. Also note that I only searched for the full name of these diseases/syndromes. Searching for the abbreviated form (e.g., "Parkinson" without "--- disease") is left to the reader (I had a go and it didn't surprise me at all that the possessive form was very popular and non-possessive rare, but there are contaminants from other uses of that name). -- Colin°^Talk 16:48, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for this, Colin. This is a very good illustration. My conclusion is that while there may be a consistent pattern for some diseases, sources do not have a consistent pattern across all diseases. We therefore should be willing to have both "Down" and "Alzheimer's", without trying to force either of them to conform to the pattern preferred for the other. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:14, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Suicidal/self-harm action description

"Do not describe suicide or other self-harm actions as being successful, unsuccessful, or failed. This is unclear and judgmental."

Ironically, this is unclear and judgmental.

How about: "This is unclear about whether the action was fatal, and implies intent that may not be known." LesbianTiamat (talk) 10:57, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

This isn't about the person's intent. Declaring the outcome (whatever it was) to be successful, unsuccessful, or failed is passing judgment on what the correct/best/good/desirable outcome is.

This particular bit of advice falls under the heading "Language choices sometimes carry connotations that are not obvious to every editor. A term or phrase that sounds normal to you might sound stigmatising, offensive, or biased to someone else." Not everyone will find every point in that list to be obvious, or even sensible. It exists to let editors know that other people have other views. Generally, I find that most editors don't want the choice of language ("How dare they call that 'successful'!) to be the main thing that people remember from an article they're writing. Following that advice might help people focus on the article's contents instead of on wording choices. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:43, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

Well said. I try to make similar points pretty frequently, along the lines that if what you've written causes a mental revolt in the reader about the wording, especially along offense-taking lines, then your writing has failed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:50, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, SMcCandlish thought you may be interested in The Finnish miracle: how the country halved its suicide rate – and saved countless lives. I thought of you guys when I read this bit:

Just a few decades ago, the word “suicide” was also almost unsayable – and unprintable. Soon after it opened in 1972, Mieli’s crisis centre in Helsinki changed its name from “suicide prevention centre” to “crisis prevention centre” because there were objections to publishing the word in the phone book. For many older Finnish people, Sihvola says, “suicide” is still a difficult word to say; as with the word “bear” – as in the animal – there is a sense that saying it will bring it closer.

Colin°^Talk 20:27, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Observance of correlation is never proof of causation, and is often coincidental, though it is interesting, and in association with a lot more data might be food for thought. But for one thing, there's a linguistic absurdity here: English isn't used in Finland (except here and there as a second language), so suicide was not the word in question, but some Finnish word (probably itsemurha) that is usually translated into English as suicide. There may be shades of meaning and implication (possible multiple of them) pertaining to that word (or some other – what was the actual name of the institution in question?) in the Finnish language and its philological history.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:52, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

That might be the case, but it's more likely that they have a naming is calling superstition (which is widespread). See also the reticence of English speakers to use the word cancer just one generation ago. People used euphemisms like wikt:big C, or they whispered it.

It would be interesting to see whether Attempted Suicide Short Intervention Programme is notable, or at least if it's worth mentioning as an example of secondary prevention or in suicide prevention. It should be mentioned in Suicide in Finland.

The line "The highest proportion of attempts are still among middle-aged men" has reminded me that we need to check the main suicide-related articles to see whether we have too much "angsty impulsive teen" stereotype. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:34, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I read it as when they wrote 'the word "suicide"' they meant whatever the Finish word was, not the English word. It made me wonder if there are words like that in English. And also whether other cultures have the same attitude to euphemisms as we do (or even if we are consistent). Like I sense we consider them foolish nonsense to be avoided in technical or professional writing but in other cultures they might think professional writing required some of them in order to avoid being outrageously rude or distractingly offensive. -- Colin°^Talk 08:54, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that one's own settled euphemisms are not always obvious. It's just the way you write. We resist some of them (e.g., WP:PASSEDAWAY) but not others (e.g., the articles containing some variation on "use the toilet" instead of defecate or urinate). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Feminine hygiene appears to be a contentious euphemism that remains the article name. Discussions on renaming this seem stalled on COMMONNAME arguments (COMMONNAME is not necessarily encyclopaedic) and not giving an inch in the gender-neutral debate. Outside of the weirdness that is Wikipedia, I can't find anyone arguing for keeping this euphemism from a bygone sexist age. A quick PubMed search of article title/abstract in the last 10 years had "Menstrual Hygiene" eight times more popular than "Feminine Hygiene". UK supermarkets have dropped the term in favour of "Period products". -- Colin°^Talk 16:58, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if editors would have better success in finding a title for that article if they first decided whether it should be "products" or "hygiene" (which would include not only commercial products, but also non-product-oriented activities like washing). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:40, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Does Major depressive disorder, a featured article violate WP:MEDSAY?

I have noticed that this article contains a long excerpt from Digital media use and mental health, which lists many systematic reviews and describes them in detail, for example:

• In April 2013, the Journal of Adolescent Health published a systematic review of 33 studies of adolescent girls that found a positive association between screen time and depression.
• In June 2016, Adolescent Research Review published a systematic review of 12 studies of subjects aged 11 to 21 years that concluded that while internet technology may provide adolescents opportunities to seek emotional and social support, the research reviewed did not establish that internet technology lowers rates of adolescent depression.
• In December 2017, Adolescent Research Review published a systematic review of 11 studies comprising 12,646 child and adolescent subjects that found a small but statistically significant correlation between social media use and depressive symptoms.

Do you think these violate WP:MEDSAY? Bendegúz Ács (talk) 18:55, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

@Bendegúz Ács, yes, I do think that is the kind of stylistic problem that MEDSAY says not to put in articles. I've blanked about 10% of the article for being out of compliance with WP:MEDDATE (this is a heavily researched area, so sources should be from the last five or so years), which will cut down on the stylistic work that needs to be done.

Overall, I wonder whether a complete re-write would be ideal. It might be easier to start over than to try to transform the existing catalog of published papers into an encyclopedia article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:34, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

I also find this article to be full of excessive undue details that make it hard to read, so I agree that a complete rewrite may be the best way to deal with it. What worries me more than Digital media use and mental health is that so much of its subpar content is excerpted in Major depressive disorder, which is a featured article, supposedly "[one] of the best articles Wikipedia has to offer". There is a call for a review of that status in the article's talk page from 2022, and based solely on the issue I found, I could agree that it's needed. Considering that I don't have too much interest in investing more time in fixing the article, do you think the best course of action in this case is to submit it to a review? Bendegúz Ács (talk) 18:07, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it would be faster to ask @Casliber about it directly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:02, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Watching high traffic articles can be difficult, especially when busy with outside endeavours for protracted periods. I'll try and take a look Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:57, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

(update) I have removed the offending section for the time being, due to it being in the wrong section of the article and in far too much detail for the scope of the article. The material should be distilled to 3-4 sentences and placed in either causes or management section. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:39, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@Bendegúz Ács: thanks for highlighting this. Took me a while to figure out what happened. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:40, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks to you too for fixing it, this is a useful experience for me to understand both the guidelines and the editing process. Bendegúz Ács (talk) 21:18, 8 April 2024 (UTC)