What are the pitfalls when therapy-speak seeps into our everyday lives?
More general awareness of mental health language is positive, but expert cautions about projecting onto others
Therapy-speak bleeding into relationship issues hit the limelight last week when Sara Brady, a surfer and ex-girlfriend of actor Jonah Hill, accused him of being a "narcissistic misogynistic" in a series of social media posts that included screenshots of alleged texts between the two.
The screenshots show the actor purportedly complaining about Brady's behaviour around male surfers which he said wasn't aligned with his boundaries as a romantic partner. Brady also claimed Hill told her to remove a photo she posted wearing a swimsuit on her own social media.
Hill, who produced a documentary about his connection with his psychiatrist Phil Stutz in 2022, has not yet commented publicly on the posts.
"Boundaries are about self-exploration and understanding how you interact in the world, not controlling the behaviour of someone else," Jessi Gold, a psychiatrist and an assistant professor at the Washington University School of Medicine, told Day 6 guest host Nana aba Duncan.
The Hill-Brady situation is an example of a trend where language used during therapy sessions makes its way into popular vocabulary.
Culture writer Rebecca Fishbein has been covering how terms like boundaries, triggers and traumas, which were designed for a therapeutic setting between patient and mental health practitioner, are increasingly being used casually in interpersonal relationships.
"Terms are often used casually, giving someone a diagnosis like, 'oh, you know, you're so OCD or I'm so OCD,'" she told CBC Front Burner. "Like obsessive compulsive disorder is something you'd be diagnosed with by a clinician, but it also might be a thing that you throw around casually talking about how you are always cleaning your apartment."
Gold said from her perspective as a psychotherapist, using medical terms casually includes how people often use the term depression as a stand-in for feeling sad or anxiety when they mean worry.
"I think we use diagnostic terms a lot and we don't actually mean the diagnosis," said Gold.
Is therapy speak getting too casual?
Both Gold and Fishbein believe the mainstreaming of mental health lingo has a lot to do with people looking for answers on social media.
"TikTok is really popular for mental health conversation. I think these therapy words have become even bigger than they were before," Gold said.
Consuming self-help content, especially coming from trained therapists, shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, she added.
Fishbein said it's only natural people are reaching out where they can for help.
"Therapy is expensive. It's hard to access. So having access to social media … self-help books and self-help articles [is] also empowering and can make you feel seen and heard."
Gold also said knowing the clinical language can have benefits outside of a formal therapeutic setting.
"It's really important that people who don't have access to mental health, which is a lot of people, that they can have some access to these terms — this information — to feel more seen, to feel more understood … to feel less alone," she said.
"But I do think that when we use the words incorrectly, that can be a problem."
Pitfalls of self-diagnosis
She cautions that issues might arise when a person starts projecting assumptions gathered from a casual understanding onto others.
There comes a point where language can be weaponized — even the term therapy itself.
"If we don't like something that feels like hatred or anger, we'll say, 'you should go to therapy.' And I've never personally liked how we've done that," said Gold.
Patients she sees with a lot of information gleaned from self-help content can make her job more challenging, she added.
Having a common language might be a starting point, but sometimes a patient who has decided on a diagnosis based on info from pop culture or social media will be more reluctant to explore other possible issues. Gold said it also makes building trust harder.
Day 6 Radio segment produced by Yamri Taddese. With files from Front Burner