One of my biggest pet peeves over the past couple weeks (and months) has been the growing phenomenon called “therapy speak”. This is where clinical terms from the therapist office are used in everyday slang. While increasing mental health literacy is generously positive the dilution of these specific terms can have a significant consequence on both interpersonal relationships and clinical understanding.
The other day I was in a coffee shop, and I overheard a conversation behind me between two individuals describing their most recent dating experiences. The first one said to their friend that their date was a narcissist and then continued to speak about the individual as a gas lighter. The second individual referred to their most recent date as bipolar. They both continues to use these words and more without knowing the significance of what they are saying and not knowing the actual definition and potential impact on the individuals that they are describing.
Words like Gaslighting, narcissist, and borderline used incorrectly have a lot of consequences because of the misuse. First, the delusion of the meaning like every word that gets overused nobody truly knows what it means, and the real definition gets lost in translation. Second, the increased stigma as insults makes people with these conditions less likely to seek help since they are villainized by the pop culture.
By labeling a partner or a friend with a clinical diagnosis during a fight often ends the conversation as it is considered an insult. It creates a power imbalance where the one person is healthy, and the other one is mentally ill according to one partner or the other. The other issue is a self-diagnosis risk of people thinking that they have an issue, and it leads them to misidentify their own behaviors or those of others without an actual professional evaluation. The reality is using these words incorrectly could be a form of bullying.
Therapy speak should be left to the clinical professionals in a therapeutic session and not used in everyday conversation. While we try to aim to increase emotional literacy people take a lot of things out of context and start throwing around the words that are imprecise superficial and ultimately weaponized. Those terms again are boundaries, narcissist, gaslighting, triggered and a whole lot more. The trend has been driven by the increase of mental health information and the rise of the therapy culture, but the real villain is social media algorithms that boost self-help content that may be taken out of context. To help alleviate this issue educating yourself with the true definition of therapy speak is the first step. Yes, terms like “insane and “crazy” have been around for generations, but the difference now is the significant change that has occurred over the decades is not that we use slang or therapy-speak, but how we use it. Unlike the coming-of-age environment of Baby Boomers, Gen X, or elder Millennials, Gen Z and their successors, Gen Alpha, are spending their childhood and adolescence in a perpetual state of technology and connectedness.
Take “gaslighting” as an example. The origin of the concept comes from the 1938 play “Gas Light,” in which a husband uses the brightening and dimming of lights to convince his wife that she is mentally ill. The word gaslighting was first printed in 1995 by the New York Times, used only sparingly for the next two decades, and then named a Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2016 following a surge in popularity of the term during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. Once a specific term referring to a meticulously planned attempt to make a person believe that they cannot trust their own senses, gaslighting is now often used in the common vernacular to refer to essentially any attempt to deny one’s previous words or actions or disagree with another person.
As members of society, we need to educate ourselves on what the words mean so that we could be mindful of the usage we can support loved ones with mental health concerns and direct them to the appropriate resources for professional support. As professionals like myself, we need to create and share accurate psychoeducation on social media like I’m doing with my blog here and with my YouTube channel (Youtube.com/@askchrisk). By engaging in collaborative discussions with our clients who may be misusing the terminology will also provide education.
We need to understand that language matters and that it is consistently changing we need to do our best to keep up with everything, but we do need to question trends and fads and what the real meaning of the word is and how it is being used. Is someone using it as a weapon or somebody using it to sound educated when they’re not if we’re not careful the weaponization of therapy speak could be potentially compared to words of racism hate and more. Let’s make sure as individuals who we consider to be high achieving and educated that we act like it.
Still unsure on how to handle or deal with the “therapy talk”, book a session with me and let’s discuss. You can also check out my videos on this topic and more at https://youtu.be/GbLDkl_78Ig and https://youtube.com/shorts/S7o8qcg4dOM
