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Key Takeaways
- The popularization of mental health content has grown substantially in recent years.
- While good psychology information is available online, social media has amplified misinformation and over-generalizations.
- Mental health awareness requires distinguishing between these everyday problems of living and genuine disorders to ensure people get the right kind of help.
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When I was growing up, mental health was rarely talked about. Most people knew someone who had gone to therapy and generally accepted it as a necessary step in getting the help they needed. But what happened on the chaise lounge stayed on the chaise lounge. People didn’t discuss their diagnoses, and if therapy came up, it was usually in reference to the latest episode of The Sopranos.
This began to change in the aughts. The U.S. Congress passed laws to make mental health more accessible and affordable. Celebrities opened up about their struggles with depression and anxiety, and the internet offered unprecedented access to mental health information.
All positive changes, but then things continued to accelerate. Today, online mental health advice is as contradictory as it is universal. Psychology apps abound in online stores, often marketed with grand but unfounded efficacy claims. Social media “experts” shrink life-sized advice into bite-sized clips, and it lately seems like everyone struggles with depression or anxiety or trauma or OCD or some other condition.
It all has me wondering if we have overcorrected. Has the assumption that anything labeled “mental wellness” is an unalloyed good led to misleading fads and even an open-air market of psychological scams?
To help me sort this out, I spoke with Joe Nucci, an LPC who has spent a lot of time thinking about how we discuss mental health in the broader culture. In the introduction to his new book, Psychobabble, he notes that this cultural shift from stigmatized to popularized has had its benefits, but also drawbacks.
“The popularization of mental health terminology has given rise to an army of armchair experts who regularly speak on the topic and — knowingly or unknowingly — misuse psychological jargon,” he writes. “They spread misinformation and often inflict a lot of damage in the process.”
Nucci calls this misinformation psychobabble, a term used to describe when the language of psychology is used “to create an impression of authority, truth, or plausibility” but ultimately lacks all three [emphasis original]. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the internet — social media in particular — is filled to bursting with psychobabble.
In layman’s terms
Nucci’s warning over psychobabble isn’t an exercise in professional gatekeeping. He believes widespread access to good mental health information is a windfall. Such knowledge helps people recognize potentially disturbing mood or thinking patterns. This recognition can lead them to seek the help they need. It also primes us to be more compassionate for those living with such disorders — both as individuals and as a society.
Nor is he saying that the language of psychology should be kept behind academic lock and key. If a spouse wants to playfully refer to his partner’s “OCD,” a comedian wants to land a cheeky riff about her ex-boyfriend’s “gaslighting,” or a columnist seeks to strengthen a point by referring to a politician’s “schizophrenic” policies, that’s fine. He enjoys satire, exaggeration, and all those other rhetorical tools that make language so fun and expressive.
The problem, he contends, is that we have reached a point where we no longer agree on what these terms even mean. Autism used to refer to people with significant developmental impairments; today, it applies as readily to “quirky tech CEOs” and teens who prefer Legos over organized sports. Narcissism is defined by long-standing patterns of grandiosity, an extreme need for attention, and fantasies of unlimited brilliance. Your average self-centered asshole doesn’t make the grade.
“Psychology is an incredibly rich field full of insights, but if we’re not careful, we’ll misapply them, and we can make the wrong decisions and interpretations,” Nucci says while offering two cases for how misapplying those insights can lead to problems.
Case number one: Inaccurate information convolutes data and degrades research quality. For instance, Nucci found a poll in which roughly 70% of Gen Z respondents said they would rather be “love bombed” than date someone emotionally unavailable. Now, emotional unavailability can be a real problem in a relationship, but love bombing is technically defined as a form of emotional abuse.
Did the respondents recognize this distinction and provide their preference, or did they imagine love bombing to be something out of an ensemble-cast rom-com? I would guess the latter, but without a shared understanding of what these terms mean — generally but also in relation to the poll’s methodology — people reading the results may take away conflicting views about young people’s inclinations and what’s happening in their mental lives.
“Getting it right starts with just defining our terms — as simple as that might sound,” Nucci says.
An infographic from the love bombing survey. While love bombing has become culturally prevalent, especially on social media, it is technically a form of emotional abuse. Love bombers are associated with antisocial traits such as narcissistic personality disorder (attributable to between 1–2% of the population). This makes it unlikely that a majority of Americans have been victimized. (Credit: Shane Co.)
The medicalization of everyday life
The second case is the medicalization of everyday life. Building on Allen Frances’s thesis in Saving Normal (2013), Nucci worries that we’ve begun to pathologize typical emotions and thought patterns. Instead of feeling sad, you are depressed. Instead of being shy, you have social anxiety. Instead of a painful memory of the time you cried in front of your entire 4th-grade class the day after your hamster died, the experience proved capital-T traumatic.
I don’t want to sound dismissive. Life is hard. It’s full of challenges and stressors that require us to feel emotions we’d rather not. Sometimes, those emotions can surface unannounced years after the fact. (4th-graders can be a seriously savage bunch.)
But these are normal experiences. They are the “problems of living” that we all have to come to grips with, and the emotions they elicit can be healthy. The difference between a problem of living (feeling down or having a fear of public speaking) and a diagnosis (clinical depression and social anxiety) is born of intensity and duration.
As Nucci explains, you can likely handle a problem of living on your own, with support from friends and loved ones. It may take some lifestyle changes. If you’ve been feeling gloomy and exhausted lately, but you’ve also been staying up late and not eating well, then it may not be depression but just your emotions signaling that you need more sleep and some vitamins in your diet. Throw in some more exercise while you’re at it, and you’ll likely feel much better.
“Mental health disorders do not work like that,” Nucci says. They are far more persistent. Clinical depression is typically diagnosed when someone exhibits five or more specific symptoms for at least two weeks. Getting a handle on such a severe mood disorder generally requires professional intervention and a bespoke approach. Mindfulness may prove helpful for some people experiencing depression, but for others, the practice can deepen those feelings. Knowing that and finding the right treatments for an individual patient can’t be reduced to a TikTok video — or even an entire evening scrolling through #psychologytricks.
“One of the temptations for using psychobabble is that people want to feel seen and understood. When people use this language, I think that they do it in an attempt to feel validated, to feel like their internal experience is being taken seriously,” Nucci says.
But he adds, “I fear that we’re in a time where it is having the opposite effect. People use these terms — my ex was a narcissist, my anxiety, my depression — and just assume that it is something normal. Once upon a time, these things were not normal experiences. They were real, clinical phenomena.”
That creeping feeling
Again, I should be clear that Nucci isn’t arguing that we can’t use the word depressed to mean “sad” or anxious to mean “worried” in conversation. His message is that we shouldn’t feel the need to label these normal problems of living with such clinical terms to make them seem worthy of care and compassion.
“Hard times can be psychologically impactful without reaching the level of psychopathology,” he writes in Psychobabble. Lacking such clear distinctions for clinical diagnoses risks another concern with psychobabble: concept creep.
Coined by the psychologist Nicholas Haslam, concept creep refers to the gradual broadening of a psychological diagnosis’s meaning to include a much wider range of phenomena than it previously did. We’ve already seen this with autism, and Haslam’s research suggests something similar is happening to trauma. The term was once reserved for the emotional fallout from life-shattering events, such as battlefields, plane crashes, or violent assaults. Today, it has expanded to cover a range of far less severe life adversities in both public discourse and the academic literature.
In a 2023 study, Haslam and his fellow researchers also looked at concept creep in depression and anxiety. Their study analyzed how the words were used in the abstracts of more than 800,000 psychology articles alongside a large collection of general sources (movie scripts, newspapers, interview transcripts, etc.). They found the concepts had undergone concept creep from 1970 to 2018, and that the emotional severity people associated with them also increased. In other words, people began using the words to refer to a broader range of life experiences while at the same time viewing those experiences as more pathological than normal.
One of the most effective interventions I have found as a psychotherapist is to normalize and not pathologize the patient’s experience
“You can’t study the causes of a condition if no one agrees what the condition is,” Nucci writes, “and you can’t make policy based on faulty evidence.”
Beyond the psychological profession, concept creep can confuse ordinary people hoping to understand their emotional worlds. If you think your feelings are normal, the idea of processing them seems manageable. Conversely, if you worry that your feelings are pathological, you may become mired in rumination such that you can’t process those feelings healthily, or you may fear you have a condition with no remedy.
“One of the most effective interventions I have found as a psychotherapist is to normalize and not pathologize the patient’s experience,” Nucci writes.
“When assessed accurately, most people experience huge amounts of symptom relief when they learn that their feelings are understandable, that lots of people worry about these things, and that lots of people struggle in similar ways. It is sometimes less helpful to label their concerns with a scary term such as social anxiety when plenty of people feel self-conscious around others or feel nervous speaking in front of a crowd of their peers.” [Emphases original.]
On translating psychobabble
Psychobabble can make it seem as if everyone needs to go to therapy. But Nucci reasons that while anyone can benefit from therapy, it doesn’t mean everyone needs it.
This isn’t a moral judgment, he clarifies, and is as much a supply-and-demand issue as a mental health one. There simply aren’t enough clinicians to serve the estimated 1 in 5 American adults who will suffer a mental illness each year. Even if we assume the U.S. has 500,000 working therapists — a vast overestimate, Nucci admits, but it keeps the math simple — and each one saw 40 patients a week, that would still leave more than 40 million Americans unable to receive treatment (a figure that does not include the 1 in 7 youths who will also experience a mental illness).
Even well-intentioned psychobabble can add strain to this system while generating needless worry and costs for those it influences.
That said, don’t be afraid to do your own research. A lot of good information is available online and in books; Nucci asks that we be cautious and critical of that information. Investigations into psychology content on social media platforms have found them full-to-bursting with misinformation and over-generalizations. One such study estimated that only 27% of TikTok videos on autism contained accurate information.
Be wary of the conclusions you draw from that information, too. Social media influencers can encourage self-diagnosis — implicitly or explicitly — but the practice only increases the chances of a misdiagnosis. A little knowledge is, as the old saw goes, a dangerous thing.
And if you’re worried that you may have a mental illness, schedule an appointment with a clinician and have a talk. During that conversation, Nucci recommends asking the therapist how they understand the differences between mental health disorders and the everyday problems of living. A good, honest practitioner will clearly lay out the differences and won’t rush to label your feelings. They may even recommend that therapy isn’t necessarily for you and you would be better off spending your time (and $300) getting better sleep, pursuing an exercise and diet plan, reconnecting with loved ones, or some other non-clinical intervention that may improve your mood and life.
“That’s a really ethical way to conduct mental health treatment,” Nucci says.
Of course, whether we’re discussing personal health or social interventions, none of this is easy. Many people will experience a mental illness, and we don’t want things backtracking to where they were when Nucci and I were kids (to say nothing of the cultures of our parents’ and grandparents’ days). People should be able to be open about their struggles, go to therapy without judgment, and find the help they need.
But if we want mental health to be viewed in the same light as other medical issues, then we can’t rely on psychobabble and quick fixes. We need to make the time and effort to properly understand the insights of psychology.
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