When did therapy-speak enter our everyday vocabulary?

25:00When did therapy become entertainment?

If you watch TV these days, you'll notice it feels like everyone is in therapy — from sitcoms like Ted Lasso and Never Have I Ever to reality shows like Bling Empire.

And it's not just TV. Movies, podcasts and TikTok influencers have all begun to turn therapy and mental health into entertainment. But in gaining a greater vocabulary to talk about our internal lives, are we losing our ability to appreciate the nuances of mental health issues?

Culture writers Delia Cai and Ishani Nath tell host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about the ways therapy-speak going mainstream has impacted us as a culture, for better and for worse.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion on the rise of therapy-speak in everyday conversation, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: The idea of should [therapy] be entertainment is something I think about a lot, because it does exact a cost on you when you start to treat something as important as therapy with the lens that you treat entertainment with. Delia, we're going to talk about this because you recently talked to Esther Perel. Perel has kind of become a household name in her own right. She's got a podcast called Where Should We Begin?, and that is honestly a big part of why therapy has become so popular in entertainment. She sits down with actual people and helps them work through their issues — but also, you get to be a fly on the wall and listen in. You interviewed Esther for Vanity Fair. What did she tell you about the way therapy's kind of having this mainstream moment?

Delia: Yes, she was very heartened by the fact that when [she] was much younger, this was just a verboten topic. You did not talk about going to therapy. And so she thinks it's amazing that there are all these conversations happening about mental health and it's a very normal thing to just dedicate a lot of your time and energy to.

But she did say something that was really interesting to me about the use of therapy-speak. She was saying it's just another term for psychobabble, and she said we sort of use these therapeutic terms like weapons, especially in conflicts with people we're in relationships with where we're so quick to say, "You're gaslighting me," or, "You're activating my insecure attachment." And it's kind of ironic that we have these words to describe experiences and feelings that maybe we didn't have before, but we're also sort of overusing them and we're using them in a way that kind of shuts down the conversation. Because the minute you're like, "Hey, you're gaslighting me" — that's not open to conversation. It just sort of feels like you're saying, "My feelings are super legitimate, yours are not." And so she was saying it's making us more isolated from each other and lonelier even as we have this new vocab.

Ishani: I feel like a huge part of it, too, is that people don't understand what they're saying sometimes. They'll use these terms, but they don't necessarily know what those mean. We're using "gaslighting" for everything these days.

Delia: Everything.

Ishani: Right? And maybe its initial meaning has changed. But when we're talking about therapy and what that looks like in that space, I feel like the way that we use it is not the same.

Elamin: There's something to be said about the cost that is exacted when you shift the original meaning to become some new, social meaning. Because we're kind of using "gaslight" as shorthand for deceiving a person, right? And we have a word for that; it's called deception. We don't need another one. Gaslighting is its own separate context. But there's something to be said about all of these words that we used to refer to as a really significant thing, Delia, but now we have all these sort of cutesy shorthands for them. For example, I see a lot of people talking about "menty b's," which is like a short for mental breakdown. I see the word "delulu" in my feed all the time, short for delusional — and it becomes kind of cutesy. But also I'm worried that we kind of lose touch of the fact that these words mean something in a particularly therapeutic context that makes sense.

Delia: I feel like the vocab has kind of made us also just more rigid about interactions with people. Everything is either a red flag or a green flag and not just, I don't know — people are weird. This is just a quirk.

Elamin: Ishani, as you did research into therapy on reality shows like Vanderpump Rules and Bling Empire, did you find that there was value? Is it useful for people to be airing their therapy sessions?

Ishani: I'll be honest, I went into this story expecting to say, "We're crossing a line. Therapy should not be on reality TV. These are not two things that should mix." But I did end up actually finding a lot of positives, which is surprising. I think the biggest one is de-stigmatizing mental health — that idea that you fear what you don't understand, or what you can't see. So being able to see what a therapist looks like, what a therapy office can look like, what that conversation can be like, and the fact that therapy a lot of the time is just a conversation, I think that can really help demystify it for a lot of people. 

And a lot of these shows are just about everyday people. We're not talking about Intervention or My Strange Addiction here. These are everyday people who are also trying to figure out their mental health or getting support. I think that that also has value, particularly with shows like Bling Empire or Family Karma where the cast is all underrepresented individuals. Family Karma is all Indian-Americans. As a member of the South Asian diaspora, we do not talk about therapy, let alone couples therapy. We don't tell other people our business. So getting to see that on a show, it becomes so normalized. I think that's a huge positive.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.