Abuse and the need to define the difference between emotional and psychological

SNOMED Groups Translation User Group
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Abuse is one of the English terms that are hard to translate as it could correspont to 1 of 3 Swedish terms (övergrepp, misshandel, vanvård) depending on context. We do have som strong connotations so that two words are always used together, like psychological abuse would be psykologisk misshandel (never övergepp or vanvård), while sexual abuse always would be sexuellt övergrepp.

In Snomed CT, psychological abuse has the SCTID 1279642005, a child to 417928002 Abuse (event). But then we have emotional abuse, SCTID 37177300, also a child to 417928002 Abuse but not connected to psychological abuse.

In Sweden we only use the term psychological abuse, not emotional. We have had it translated anyway, but in the same way as with other issues I have raised, this could lead to users selecting the wrong code, as they should not use emotional abuse.

A definition here would help the users to differentiate between the two, or make it clear of emotional is a synonym to psychological in this context.

More languages with the same issue?

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I didn’t think we had the same issue but looking at it through your lens, I think we actually have the same issue in Dutch as you have in Swedish. The Dutch government places psychological and emotional abuse as equivalents of one another. Some (semi-)official sources speak of emotional abuse (emotionele mishandeling), others of psychological or mental abuse (psychische/psychologische mishandeling), but never as two distinctly different phenomena.

I think it would be helpful to have definitions provided for these concepts, as in Dutch the distinction between emotional and psychological abuse seems artificial to me as well.

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We have moved away from using “mental” in the Swedish medical terminology, and “emotional” has some negative connotations, especially denoting women’s experiences so we use psychological a lot as a neutral word.

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