Todays post is by Manuel Almagro (University of Valencia) and Carme Isern-Mas (University of the Balearic Islands), presenting their recent paper 'Blunting concepts: The double-edged effect of popularizing psychotherapy language' (Philosophical Psychology).
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| Manuel Almagro |
In the last week, a friend might have described a harmful and impactful past experience as “traumatic”, talked about their “OCD” after arranging their bookshelf by color, or called a weekend of binge-watching shows and ignoring work emails “self-care”. A colleague might have tried to justify their demand that their partner not hang out with friends under the pretext that these were their “boundaries”. A relative might have explained their feelings of exhaustion and detachment as symptoms of “burn-out”, or mentioned that their boss has recommended “mindfulness” to an overwhelmed worker so that they can better cope with time pressure atwork. Psychotherapy language is more and more present in our everyday talk.
Philosophers have highlighted two effects of this everyday presence of mental health terms. Yet, when put together, these two effects seem to be in tension.
On the one hand, the mainstreaming of psychotherapy language is interpreted as a sign of progress raising mental health awareness and fighting mental health stigma. In philosophical terms, this has been analyzed as advancing hermeneutical justice, namely, as improving people’s capacity to understand and share their experiences. In this sense, the fact that people have access to the words “burn-out” and “OCD” helps them better understand and share their experience. Similarly, it allows them to seek spaces where they can feel part of a communityand find support. The growing everyday use of psychotherapy terms is, therefore, empowering.
On the other hand, the mainstreaming of psychotherapy language has also been interpreted as a deterioration of mental health vocabulary, and as a pathologization of everyday struggles. In philosophical terms, this has been analyzed as causing hermeneutical injustice, namely, as degrading people’s capacity to understand and share their experiences. In this sense, using the word “boundaries” to justify one’s abusive and controlling demands, or the word “OCD” to refer to one’s quirks and preferences for arranging things in a certain way, distorts and trivializes these hermeneutical resources. The growing everyday use of psychotherapy terms is, therefore, troubling.
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| Carme Isern-Mas |
By “mental health speak” we refer to a linguistic practice aimed at promoting mental health awareness and providing people with hermeneutical resources. This is the kind of social practice we usually find in mental health awareness campaigns, journalistic coverage of mental health, and similar contexts. When our clinical psychologist tells us to set up “boundaries” to the demands of our boss, or explains how OCD involves intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviors rather than mere neatness, they are engaging in this linguistic practice.
By contrast,“therapy-speak” refers to a relatively recent linguistic practice that reframes interpersonal or morally complex situations in psychological terms, often without genuine concern for mental health. When someone uses the word “boundaries” to impose controlling demands on their partner, or says they’re “so OCD” in response to their partner telling them not to put the vegetables at the back of the fridge because they freeze, they might be using “therapy-speak”to frame an interpersonal and moral conflict as a psychological one.
Interestingly, these two linguistic practices use the same words, but in a different way, with different meanings. As a result the uses of one practice erode the meanings of the other practice. Consequently, the use of the word “boundaries” by an abusive partner ends up eroding the meaning of the same word when used by a clinical psychologist. Similarly, when someone says they’re “so OCD” because they prefer their fridge organized a certain way, this trivializes theterm and undermines its usefulness for describing the actual experiences of people withobsessive-compulsive disorder. This influence ends up making the concept “blunt”, namely, making it less useful for effectively capturing and communicating the experiences they wereoriginally meant to describe.