Reference

The Clinical Lexicon

Every specialized term used on this site, defined in plain language, with a path to the full article wherever one exists. Definitions here are starting points, not diagnostic criteria.

Neurodivergence

AuDHD: Co-occurring autism and ADHD in the same person; the combination produces patterns neither neurotype fully explains alone. → Forty Years Late
Autistic burnout: A state of chronic exhaustion, skill loss, and reduced tolerance to stimulus caused by prolonged demands exceeding capacity; distinct from clinical depression (Raymaker et al., 2020). → Autistic Burnout: Definition, Causes & Suicide Risk
Meltdown: An involuntary overload response expressed outward: intense distress, agitation, or crying. Not a tantrum, not manipulation, and not within voluntary control once underway. → Autistic Meltdowns vs. Shutdowns
Shutdown: The same overload mechanism turned inward: withdrawal, reduced or absent speech, and disconnection. → Autistic Meltdowns vs. Shutdowns
Sensory overload: Sensory input exceeding the nervous system's processing capacity in the moment; the usual precursor to meltdown or shutdown.
Masking (camouflaging): Suppressing or performing over neurodivergent traits to pass as neurotypical; research distinguishes compensation, masking, and assimilation (Hull et al., 2019). → Autism Camouflaging & Masking
CAT-Q: The Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire, the primary research measure of masking (Hull et al., 2019). → Autism Camouflaging & Masking
Alexithymia: Difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotional states; common alongside autism and ADHD and frequently mistaken for not caring. → Alexithymia in Autism & ADHD
Interoception: The sense of the body's internal signals: hunger, thirst, pain, temperature, heartbeat, and emotion as physical sensation. → What the Body Already Knew
Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD): An extreme, rapid-onset emotional response to real or perceived rejection, criticism, or failure, experienced as physically painful and out of proportion to the trigger. A clinical description originating with William Dodson's ADHD practice, not a formal diagnosis: RSD does not appear in the DSM-5-TR and, as of 2026, has no validated measure. → Is There a Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria Test?
Rejection sensitivity: The disposition to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and overreact to rejection, understood to develop from early or repeated experiences of rejection by significant figures (Downey & Feldman, 1996). A validated research construct, and a narrower one than rejection sensitive dysphoria: it measures anticipation, not the intensity or duration of the response once rejection is perceived. → Is There a Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria Test?
Double empathy problem: The finding that misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic people runs in both directions: a mutual translation gap, not a one-sided deficit (Milton, 2012). → The Double Empathy Problem
Monotropism: An attention style concentrated in fewer, deeper channels of interest; a leading account of autistic cognition and the basis of hyperfocus and special interests.
Insistence on sameness: Distress driven by disrupted predictability itself, independent of any relationship; a core autistic trait often misread through relational frameworks.
Stimming: Self-stimulatory movement or sound (rocking, tapping, humming, fidgeting) used for regulation, focus, expression, or joy.
Sensory seeking / avoiding / sensitivity / low registration: The four sensory processing patterns in Dunn's model, produced by crossing neurological threshold (how fast input registers) with response strategy (active or passive).
Spoon theory: Christine Miserandino's metaphor (2003) for limited daily energy: every task costs spoons, and when they're gone, they're gone, regardless of desire.
Boom-or-bust cycle: Overexertion on capable days that forces crash days after; the pattern pacing strategies exist to flatten.
Executive function: The mind's management processes: task initiation, planning, working memory, time sense, and switching between activities.
Diagnostic overshadowing: The error of attributing every new symptom, complaint, or account to a person's existing diagnosis, so real and unrelated problems go unexamined. → Ableism as a Weapon
Reasonable accommodations: A change to the environment, schedule, or expectations of a job or course that removes a disability-related barrier, without changing what the work fundamentally is. What an employer is entitled to know is the functional limitation: the task that has become unreliable and the condition under which it becomes reliable again: not the diagnosis or clinical history. → Asking Without Overexplaining: Neurodivergent Accommodations
Functional limitation: A plain description of a task you cannot reliably perform under current conditions, and the condition under which you can: the language accommodation processes actually run on. Distinct from a diagnosis: it describes what happens, not what you have. → Asking Without Overexplaining: Neurodivergent Accommodations

Sensory and Regulation

Proprioception: The sense of where your body is and how hard it is working, read from muscles and joints.
Vestibular sense: The inner-ear sense of movement and balance. Slow, linear movement tends to settle it, while spinning tends to overload it.
Deep pressure: Firm, even input spread across the body, as from a weighted blanket or compression.
Heavy work: Activity that pushes or pulls against real resistance, such as carrying something heavy or pressing both palms into a wall.
Discharge: Activation leaving the body through whatever route is available. The route can be cheap or costly.
Novelty seeking: Attention pulled toward what might happen next. Anything with a surprise in it recruits seeking. This is different from sensory seeking in Dunn's model, which is about needing more input.
Sensory diet: A planned schedule of sensory input placed ahead of predictable demands, so regulation does not depend on noticing a state after it has arrived. The term comes from occupational therapy.
Outcome variability: How much an object's response changes from one use to the next. High variability pulls attention toward the object.
Optimal stimulation: The model that attention works best at a moderate level of arousal, so an under-aroused person moves to reach it (Zentall & Zentall, 1983).
Predictive processing: An account of the brain as a prediction engine. Applied to autism, unpredictable input costs more, and self-generated repetitive input supplies predictability.
Occupational therapist (OT): A licensed clinician who assesses how sensory processing affects daily life, and who can build a sensory profile and a sensory diet.
Sensory profile: A structured assessment of over- and under-responsiveness by sensory channel. The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile and the Glasgow Sensory Questionnaire are two examples.

Adapted Mindfulness

Rung: One of five positions on a single axis in Adapted Mindfulness, from motor pressure at 1 to shutdown at 5. It is read from evidence rather than from how you feel.
Object: Whatever attention is resting on during practice. A stim can be the object.
Anchor: Input that steadies attention without taking it. A tool stops being an anchor once it becomes the object.

Trauma & Abuse Dynamics

DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender: a perpetrator response pattern in which the accused denies the harm, attacks the credibility of the person naming it, and claims the victim role (Freyd, 1997). → DARVO: When Abusers Accuse Their Victims
Flying monkeys: Third parties recruited by an abusive person (knowingly or not) to pressure, surveil, harass, or discredit a target on the abuser's behalf. → Flying Monkeys & Smear Campaigns
Smear campaign: A coordinated reputation attack designed to isolate a target and pre-discredit anything they might later disclose. → Flying Monkeys & Smear Campaigns
Reactive abuse: A provoked outburst from a victim, reframed by the provoker as proof the victim is the real abuser; a clinical descriptor of a dynamic, not a DSM category. → Reactive Abuse
Coercive control: A pattern of domination built from isolation, monitoring, degradation, financial restriction, and micro-regulation of daily life: harm that rarely requires a visible incident.
Identified patient: The family member a dysfunctional system unconsciously assigns to carry and display its distress, so the system itself never has to change. → The Family Sin-Eater
Sanism: Systemic prejudice against people perceived as mentally ill, operating like other structural biases; the term is associated with legal scholar Michael Perlin. → Ableism as a Weapon
Hypervigilance: A trauma-shaped state of continuous threat-scanning that persists after the danger has ended.

Gender & Identity

Gender-affirming care: Evidence-based medical and psychological support aligned with a person's gender, delivered under international standards. → Hormone Therapy & WPATH SOC8
WPATH SOC8: The World Professional Association for Transgender Health's Standards of Care, Version 8 (Coleman et al., 2022): the governing international clinical standard for transgender and gender-diverse healthcare. → Hormone Therapy & WPATH SOC8
Gender dysphoria: Distress arising from a mismatch between a person's gender and the body or social role assigned to them. A diagnostic term in the DSM-5-TR, which is a source of ongoing disagreement: the diagnosis is what unlocks insurance coverage in most systems, and it also frames a difference as a disorder. Distress is common but is not a requirement for being transgender. → The Gender Lab
Gender euphoria: The positive counterpart to dysphoria: the relief, rightness, or pleasure that arrives when gender is recognized, expressed, or embodied accurately. Increasingly used in assessment because it is easier to report than distress, particularly for people with alexithymia. → Alexithymia and Gender
Nonbinary: A gender that is not exclusively male or female. An umbrella covering many specific identities rather than a single position between two poles. SOC-8 is the first version of the Standards of Care to address nonbinary people in a chapter of their own. → The Nonbinary Chapter in SOC-8
Informed consent: Agreement to a medical intervention given with an understanding of what it does, what it does not do, what is reversible, and what the risks are. Also the name of a care model in which capacity to consent, rather than a mental health referral, is the basis for access to hormone therapy. → What a Therapist Letter Under SOC-8 Actually Requires
Letter of support: A clinical document confirming that a qualified professional assessed someone and what the assessment found, addressed to a surgeon, prescriber, or insurer. A record rather than a permission slip. → What a Therapist Letter Under SOC-8 Actually Requires
Real-life experience (RLE): A requirement in earlier standards that a person live continuously in their gender role for a set period before qualifying for genital surgery. Removed in SOC-8, on the reasoning that it exposed people to risk during the period they were least equipped to manage it. → SOC-7 to SOC-8: What Actually Changed
Embodiment goals: What a person wants their body to be and do, described directly rather than inferred from a destination. The organizing question in nonbinary-affirming assessment, where the goal may be a specific partial change rather than a recognizable endpoint. → The Nonbinary Chapter in SOC-8
Gender Self-Report (GSR): A dimensional measure of gender experience developed by Strang and colleagues through a community-driven process that included autistic and gender-diverse collaborators. Asks about self-perception and wishes rather than about distress, and reports continuous values rather than a category. → Alexithymia and Gender

Buddhist Psychology

Interbeing: Thich Nhat Hanh's term for radical interdependence: nothing exists separately, including a self; everything is made of non-self elements.
Impermanence: The observation that all conditions (cells, moods, relationships, identities) are already changing; resisting this is a primary engine of suffering.

Definitions on this page are educational orientation, not diagnostic criteria, and several terms (noted above) are clinical descriptors rather than formal diagnoses. Sources for the research-anchored entries appear in the linked articles and on our Evidence Standards & Source Library page. Current as of July 2026. Evidence Standards & Source Library.

Content on this site is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Nothing here creates a therapist–client relationship. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or go to your nearest emergency room.