> "Do you have trouble concentrating" is terribly vague and can always be justified either way

To be fair, for the practitioner this shouldn't be a question about objective capital-letter Truth, it's one throw of darts representing a self-reported aspect of self-experience and self-perception.

As someone who has designed questionnaires for a public health agency, reading the article made me feel we should've fully randomized the order of appearance of individual questions, including the 'front-matter' stuff like self-reported gender, age, education, marital status.

As someone who got quite upset about a particular questionnaire's formulations at the tender age of 10, I'd now say let's not get too wrought up about this, a questionnaire can be a valid tool but it will also always be a somewhat blunt tool, so let's use it bluntly: don't fret, put your mark into one of those five boxes, move on to the next question, done, over, out. If it's about me then it's about how I feel about it, now, and I can choose to feel extremely good or bad or fairly somewhat well-nigh indifferent about sh*t, just here and now. As the one being questionnaired, I also have the right to lean into the questions and bend the outcome as I see fit. Been there, done that.