men in white coats

Doctors or orderlies

Men in white coats are psychiatric hospital workers, so called because medical staff traditionally wore white lab coats.

The phrase typically appears in humorous or self-deprecating contexts about mental instability: Keep talking like that and the men in white coats will come for you.

It suggests being hauled away to an asylum, playing on mid-twentieth-century imagery of forcible psychiatric commitment.

Related

expert · sanatorium · surgeon · physician · asylum · rubber room · psychiatric ward · mental institution · mad scientist · straitjacket · anesthesiologist · clinician · neuroscientist · biologist · nurse · hospital staff · geneticist · pharmacologist

Opposites
mental health authority vs. patient

men in white coatsmental patients

People receiving psychiatric care

lunatics · inmates · madmen · patients

professional medical/scientific establishment vs. laypeople

men in white coatslaypeople

Those outside a profession

ordinary people · civilians · amateurs · outsiders · non-experts

conventional medicine vs. alternative approaches

men in white coatswitch doctors

Magical healers in tribes

faith healers · shamans · quacks · snake oil salesmen · naturopaths

Family

men's, manliness, manhood, mankind, white, whiter, whitest, whiten, whiteness

Familiarity
Top 500,000
Profile
Used worldwide · Timeless · Concrete · Negative · Everyday, not technical · Rated PG