The Problem with Therapy Speak

Painting by Joseph Yaeger

I'm not a therapy hater. I think there are times when therapy is really important and is a really great resource for people. However, in the modern day and age, mental illness and "therapy speak" have become so normalized that they've slipped into everyday language and life.

In the modern day and age, depression rates are higher than they've ever been. However, Gen Z also has the highest rates of self-diagnosis. Do I think some of these people are truly depressed in a way that interferes with their everyday function? Yes. Do I also think that it's a little strange that self-diagnosis and skyrocketing depression and anxiety correlate? Yes. Do I think it's likely that a lot of the people who self-diagnose aren't actually experiencing a mental illness? Absolutely. But so what? Is it really that bad if a few too many people claim to be depressed? 

It certainly isn't ideal. The overuse of therapeutic language diminishes actual psychological issues and the people who suffer from them. 

That urge to have neat handwriting is so OCD, that bad movie was actually so traumatizing, and that ugly .5 makes me want to kill myself. That sad reel I watched made me so depressed, and that person who disagreed with me once is literally such a narcissist, and you shouldn't hang out with them because they're toxic. 

Do you see the point? We've normalized mental illness to the point that these words and diagnoses have become slang. They've become totally meaningless. OCD has become not the debilitating disorder that drives people to spend hours of their night attempting to perfectly balance the light switch under the fear that their families might die if they don't, but rather just that nitty-picky urge to have all your pencils neatly lined up or your bed made perfectly. That joke about wanting to kill yourself makes light of the fact that there are people who really do want to kill themselves and relatives mourning the loss of those who went through with it. It's like how recently the go to buzzword is calling everyone a Nazi, yet we've gotten to the point that people really aren't alarmed by that accusation anymore, even though the Nazi party caused mass death and destruction. 

Not only does overusing mental health language diminish the meaning of those words, but it also allows us a scapegoat. When we make it an everyday occurrence to highlight our own proclaimed mental illness, it becomes something of a trump card. I've highlighted before the necessity of taking responsibility over one's life, but when therapy speak is something so normal, it's easy to use it as a way to blame every inconvenience on a diagnosis instead of actually taking accountability. It's a bit like when people blame their faults on their Zodiac sign since that's easier than taking responsibility.

Likewise, we can blame other people's normal human flaws on our professional diagnosis of their unresolved Freudian childhood trauma. When our friend doesn't reply or cancels plans last minute, we can tell them they're toxic. When they disagree with us on an issue, we can tell them they're crossing a boundary and that they're not allowed to speak about that anymore. 

This is especially true because of how formal and important psychological language can sound. The formality and perceived legitimacy of therapy speak really do make it easy for us to believe, whether we're telling ourselves or others that mental illness is the cause of our problems. 

And this is where we really get down to the problem. Relationships. Here's the thing. Real human relationships are flawed. We are not ChatGPT. We don't always know the answers, and we don't always say the right thing. Every single real relationship with depth to it will have fights. It will have disagreements. It will have imbalances. An imperfect relationship isn't an unhealthy relationship. A difficult person isn't a toxic person. 

To my understanding, therapy speak is meant to help fix problems. It is meant to provide tools to repair broken relationships and skills to break disordered mindsets. But you can't fix something that isn't broken. The problem isn't that therapy exists or that mental health has become destigmatized. The problem is when we try to apply therapy speak to normal, healthy relationships that don't need it. 

Most relationships are defined by their colloquialism. When we apply the impersonal formality of therapy speak, it can build up walls. When we use a diagnosis or a boundary as a bandaid solution to something someone said that hurt our feelings, we're actually making the problem worse because we're just covering up the problem instead of addressing it. When we call that person toxic for having a normal disagreement with us or being entitled to their own opinion, or when we say that person's a narcissist because they exemplified the same selfishness and self-preservation as everyone else, we're escalating the issue beyond a normal human flaw. 

Using therapy speak where it's not necessary, creating boundaries to avoid addressing necessary issues, or using a diagnosis either for you or the other person to escape responsibility doesn't work. It doesn't strengthen relationships; it inserts an unnatural additive into a space that was previously healthy, albeit imperfect. It gives us the excuse to create an emotional buffer between ourselves and the root of the problem, which is sometimes our own behavior. It allows us to disregard normal disagreements; instead of handling them rationally, we can pretend they never happened or blame them on an outside force.

For some, mental illness is a real problem. Some people have chemical imbalances in their brains that cause them legitimate harm and interrupt their daily lives. Most of us, however, are perfectly healthy and often escalate normal emotions like sadness and selfishness into depression and narcissism. We have allowed therapy speak to become something so normalized that we feel the urge to use it as a shield in every uncomfortable circumstance. But discomfort is natural. It's about time we start taking responsibility, put down the DSM-5, and face our problems for real instead of building up a bubble around ourselves.