The damaging rise in therapy-speak

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Article in the Telegraph
A few days before Christmas, Tom’s phone lit up with a text from his girlfriend. They had been together for four months and while he wasn’t passionately in love, he was happy and thought the relationship was going well.

“I’ve been talking to my sisters and I’ve realised this isn’t working,” the message read. “You frequently refuse to hold the emotional space for me to be me. You also don’t make space for the people in my life.”

The text went on, detailing more of his failings in a bizarre therapy-speak he found difficult to understand.
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Where we once considered therapy a pastime for spoilt New Yorkers, we now see it as a standard part of self-care. One adult in eight in the UK now receives mental health treatment – a rise of 60 per cent since 2004 – and millennials in particular, who can afford it, will often seek out a psychologist to help them unravel issues related to their childhood, or to look further into their predisposition for anger, stress or anxiety. This is something most older generations still find perplexing.

For many this has been a positive change, and understanding why we act the way we do is surely a good thing – but people who can’t afford private therapy or access the still-patchy care on the NHS now have a tendency to self-diagnose, which is where things can go awry.
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“There is such an emphasis on the ‘self-care’ aspect of it that is actually making us more isolated and more alone, because the focus is just on the self,” explained celebrity psychologist Esther Perel in Vanity Fair.

And while Perel agrees that it can be helpful to gain clarity about a situation by naming certain behaviours, she says that using therapy-speak in an argument means there is a “danger that you lose all nuance, that you’re basically trying to elevate your personal comments and personal experience by invoking the higher authority of psychobabble.”
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full article
The damaging rise in therapy-speak (msn.com)
 
Professionals are well aware of this appropriation of their terms. A recent LinkedIn post from Chance Marshall, the co-founder of London-based mental health service the Self Space, called out the weaponisation of therapy-speak. It reads: “Not everyone who disagrees with us is ‘toxic’; not everyone who sees something differently from us is ‘gaslighting’ us; not everyone who we’re ‘triggered’ by is doing it intentionally; ‘boundaries’ aren’t tools to control others; not every difficult experience warrants diagnosis or is a pathology.”

“There is such an emphasis on the ‘self-care’ aspect of it that is actually making us more isolated and more alone, because the focus is just on the self,” explained celebrity psychologist Esther Perel in Vanity Fair.

And while Perel agrees that it can be helpful to gain clarity about a situation by naming certain behaviours, she says that using therapy-speak in an argument means there is a “danger that you lose all nuance, that you’re basically trying to elevate your personal comments and personal experience by invoking the higher authority of psychobabble.”
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It's a good article but there's a strong message that these terms are okay for the professionals to use, it's just when amateurs start diagnosing the people around them that there are problems. I don't think the "professionals" are immune from causing harm.

This reminds me of a recent post on the FND thread, where professional guidance on diagnosing FND notes that it is commonly found in people with certain named pathological personality types. Signs of one of these types are wanting to be the centre of attention, wearing brightly coloured, revealing clothes, blindly following people they put on a pedestal, and gullibility. The result of course is that the prejudice of the medical professional then has a lot of scope to play a part in diagnosis. When I read those signs, the image of a certain very well known BPS proponent playing in a band in a short bright yellow dress came to mind.

I obviously can't diagnose someone based on a picture, a few interview videos and some papers she has co-authored. That's my point. What I am saying is that many people would qualify for ticks in some of the frankly ridiculous checklists for pathological personalities. But who then gets the label in their medical records depends a lot on who is in a vulnerable position, asking for help. It depends on their social status and who they have to stand up for them and how comfortable they make their assessors feel. I suspect that this might be why young women, especially young women who have made life difficult for people with power over them, are so often the ones ending up with the pathological personality labels and FND diagnoses.
 
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I would think that the use by patients of "therapy-speak" has risen in tandem with the regular diagnosis of anxiety, depression, and FND by doctors, particularly in female patients. Patients that get told they are mentally ill in some way or other and many of them are almost guaranteed to go and do some googling on the subject.

I would do it in such circumstances, and I would do it as a form of self-protection. For example, if I know what drugs are likely to be shoved at me, I can decide for myself what I will say No to (which realistically in my case is all of them).
 
All industries, trades and professions have 'special language' which involve both unique terms and special meaning given to otherwise every day language. When elements of these special languages, either a special term or otherwise unfamiliar meaning given to otherwise ordinary speech is found to be useful in the everyday, that term or meaning quickly transfers to common use with inevitable confusion between the everyday and the special - often to the annoyance, irritation and exasperation of those who are protective of 'their' special language' as well as to the disapproval of language puritans and pedants*.

That quoted 'text dumping' "I've been talking to my sisters ....." made me laugh out loud. The response to that is obvious though the specifics would need to be rendered in appropriate vernacular or argot. I've been hearing therapy talk in everyday speech since at least the late 70s, mostly I suspect derived from magazine self help and agony aunt verbiage. People are (hopefully) free to use the words and language they want, but talking bollocks is talking bollocks, either point it out or walk away whenever you hear it - or er um nod sagely and say just with hint of a patronising sigh ... "yes dear".

*
"I can't make this any more clear, decimation means loss of a tenth, it is not a synonym for annihilation - what is wrong with you people !" :)
 
I personally feel a debt to those like Jonathan who have pointed out that this is crap - or at least to consider whether there is any evidence to support these views. Also for pointing out that they were invited to participate in these shams and ducked out --- to embarrassed to offer this to vulnerable ill people.
If this stuff works then explain who they have helped & how ---? Thought occurs that you used to go to someone in a caravan who told you the future --- following Jonathan's advice you have to have an open mind re whether the professional in the health centre is really a more elaborate version of the person in the caravan - potentially more dangerous too! Sad --- but sometimes funny --- as per the auspicious title "celebrity psychologist Esther Perel in Vanity Fair".
 
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