Toxic terms in everyday life
DESCRIPTION:
Bed-Rotting, trauma, dissociation, toxic, narcissistic, triggered: When psychological terms become therapy-speak – pop psychology between help and pathologisation. Why clinical terms lose their meaning on TikTok and what that does to our self-perception. Dealing with toxic terms: How therapy-speak and pop psychology influence relationships. Are psychological concepts in everyday life problematic for our health?
Therapy Speak: When toxic psychological terms become part of everyday language
Trauma, triggers, toxic, narcissistic, gaslighting, triggered – psychological terms have become part of everyday language. What began as a move to destigmatise mental health is turning into pop psychology, which becomes problematic as soon as it replaces clinical diagnosis. Systemic psychotherapist Lukas Maher calls this out in his book "Trigger, Trauma, Toxic": terms and concepts from psychotherapy have taken over everyday life, with both benefits and real harm.
What does ‘Therapy Speak’ actually mean?
Therapy Speak refers to the everyday use of clinical psychological terms in contexts where their technical meaning no longer applies. Someone who used to be tired is now overstimulated. Someone who used to be stressed is now triggered. Someone who used to have difficult parents now has a toxic relationship with narcissists. People who used to laze about on the sofa now practise ‘bed-rotting’ as a form of self-care. The Mancunion’s lead article from April 2026 described this therapy-speak as a ‘community of quacks’ – a group of self-appointed semi-professionals who bandy about clinical terms without understanding their diagnostic background.
This observation is not entirely new. As early as 2024, the APA Monitor highlighted the transformation of clinical language into pop vocabulary. What is new is the speed with which individual terms make this transition into everyday life, and the matter-of-factness with which platforms offer them as categories for self-description. Lukas Mähr, a psychotherapist with over 50,000 Instagram followers at @Systemischegesundheit, systematically described the phenomenon in his 2025 book, “Trigger, Trauma, Toxic”.
“Don’t be so toxic, mate!” Why do people use clinical terms in everyday life today?
The short answer: because psychological language confers authority. The longer answer leads to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital. Anyone who says “That triggered me” claims a position of superiority that is harder to criticise than the statement “That makes me angry”. Anyone who speaks of burnout secures collective recognition for their own exhaustion. Anyone who labels themselves as neurodivergent formulates an identity that is at once a self-description, a self-diagnosis and an offer of solidarity.
This explanation should not be read as cynical. People are seeking a language for their psyche and for inner states that are difficult to express in any other way. Over decades, psychotherapy has developed a nuanced vocabulary for this, which made a serious distinction between clinically and medically grounded diagnoses and everyday experience. The fact that this vocabulary now circulates beyond clinical contexts is also a consequence of its own success, and of the growing demand for mental health as a topic of public discourse.
Which psychological terms are particularly prone to misuse?
Four terms exemplify this shift. Clinically, ‘trauma’ refers to a profound psychological or physical injury. It arises when a person experiences an extremely stressful event (such as a life-threatening situation, violence or a serious accident) that completely overwhelms their ability to cope, leading to lasting psychological or physical distress, with subsequent symptoms in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder or complex post-traumatic stress disorder. In TikTok usage, it comes to mean any painful experience. Clinically, ‘trigger’ refers to the activation of a trauma-related reaction by a specific stimulus. On Instagram, ‘That triggers me’ becomes a synonym for ‘That’s annoying’.
‘Toxic’ and ‘narcissist’ are the next pair. Clinically, narcissism is a spectrum of personality traits, at the end of which lies narcissistic personality disorder, a serious condition. In everyday life, “narcissistic” becomes a term for any difficult relationship. Content analyses show that up to 40 per cent of TikTok videos with the hashtag #trauma stretch the term beyond its clinical definition. The figures are likely even higher for “narcissists”. “Gaslighting” is used to describe disagreements, even though the term refers to a specific form of psychological manipulation.
Who benefits from ‘therapy speak’ on Instagram and TikTok?
Platforms benefit because pathologising vocabulary generates high engagement rates. Influencers benefit because they can position themselves as psychologically knowledgeable. Diagnostic apps and mental health start-ups benefit because every new self-diagnosis trend expands their target audience. Health insurers are responding with content marketing as demand for clinical terms grows. Publishers are releasing guidebooks on trauma bonding, trigger management, and inner-child healing. By 2026, ‘therapy speak’ has become a business.
Those who do not benefit are the people affected, whose diagnosis shaped the term in the first place. A person with complex post-traumatic stress disorder who exhibits persistent dissociative symptoms sees their lived reality trivialised in Instagram videos, where the word ‘dissociation’ is used to describe a brief lapse of attention during an online meeting. This is not harmless; it devalues a clinical diagnosis and the experiences of those living with it.
Why do psychotherapists criticise the language of therapy?
Lukas Maher and other psychotherapists praise the destigmatisation, but warn against oversimplifying complex relationships and mental health issues. Maher’s position: Many of these terms have a clinical background, but are greatly oversimplified online. In 2024, the American Psychological Association issued its first systematic warning that the vague use of clinical terms hinders evidence-based treatment. Anyone who comes to the practice having self-diagnosed complex trauma has already answered the diagnostic question before any examination has even taken place.
There is also a political argument. When clinical terms become overused, their communicative weight diminishes. A society in which everyone is considered traumatised can no longer highlight the specific care needs of traumatised people. Pop psychology produces pseudo-empathy at the expense of clinical precision and at the expense of those who need serious psychotherapeutic help.
How does pop psychology function as an identity brand?
Pop psychology is the use of clinical diagnostic categories as part of a public self-description. Anyone who combines terms such as ‘neurospicy’, ‘anxious-attached’, ‘highly sensitive person’ and ‘CPTSD survivor’ in their Instagram profile is creating an identity matrix. This matrix follows the logic described by Pierre Bourdieu in *La Distinction*. It converts a certain mindset (about psychology) into social capital, visibility, a claim to empathy, and options for alliance.
The crucial aspect is that pop psychology only works as long as it is not recognised as a strategy. As soon as the logic of symbolic conversion becomes apparent, it loses its effect. Bourdieu called this méconnaissance, the failure to recognise the social genesis of one’s own distinction. Speaking publicly about Therapy Speak is therefore also its dismantling.
Where does the line between destigmatisation and pathologisation lie?
The defence of the Therapy Speak movement is not without justification. Anyone who spoke about depression in the 1990s risked social sanctions. Today, this language barrier has largely been broken down. Platforms have helped young people to openly articulate their mental health struggles without immediately being regarded as having limited capacity. This is an achievement that deserves serious recognition.
The line is not drawn between clinical settings and everyday life, but between communicative expression and the fixation of identity. Someone who says, “Today was a day like a panic attack,” is using a metaphor that makes something difficult to express understandable. Anyone who says “I AM a panic patient” reinforces a self-description that stands in the way of further psychological flexibility. Therapy has the opposite task: to make rigid self-descriptions flexible again, and that only happens when people consciously engage with their own language use.
How do therapists deal with patients in ‘therapy speak’?
In practical work, no fixed rule can be formulated. In some contexts, self-diagnosis is a useful starting point for the therapeutic conversation. Patient and therapist can consider together what experiences lie behind the term ‘complex trauma’, whether these experiences meet the clinical criteria, and which aspects of one’s own history may have been obscured by the diagnostic label.
Elsewhere, self-diagnosis becomes a trap. Patients who have settled into a particular therapeutic language, such as HSP, for months on end experience any differentiation as an attack on their identity. Psychotherapy can then only attempt to slowly expand the vocabulary with additional terms, more precise distinctions, and the question of what actually cannot yet be accommodated within the existing labels. In most cases, however, such patients terminate the work quickly and instead seek a therapeutic setting that affirms their self-perception without any impulse for change.
What role do health insurance providers, publishers and social media play?
Health insurance providers such as BARMER, AOK and TK engage in content marketing, with topic selection guided by their policyholders’ search behaviour. Where TikTok and Instagram generate a certain search volume, the insurance provider’s explanatory article follows. The article confirms the topic's relevance; search volume continues to grow, and the next article follows. This cycle generates a social interest that it simultaneously describes. The media landscape precedes the clinical territory.
Publishers contribute to the stabilisation of this linguistic order through self-help literature and online courses. Terms such as ‘inner child healing’ or ‘re-parenting’ are not discussed in clinical textbooks but rather in the self-help market. This market follows its own logic of dissemination rather than clinical efficacy. In an interview with the taz in April 2025, Lukas Maher put it this way: for some mental health problems, there is no solution, but that is an uncomfortable truth that cannot be sold on the market.
What would be an appropriate stance towards ‘therapy speak’?
An appropriate stance avoids two temptations. It avoids defending clinical language as the privilege of a profession. Such defence quickly comes across as elitist and overlooks the legitimate concern of the Therapy Speak movement for a shared language. But it also avoids adopting pop vocabulary as a gesture of conformity. In doing so, the clinical field loses its operational effectiveness and its serious approach.
Communication thrives on the tension between understanding and distinguishing. Anyone who takes others seriously first listens to how they describe themselves. Those who wish to help them gradually highlight differences not yet apparent in their self-description, whilst correcting the odd misconception arising from the vague use of therapeutic terms. Therapy, too, works with material brought by patients—including pop psychology—but does not allow itself to be trapped by it. Healthy self-reflection finds its own language without becoming ensnared in new terminology.
Summary: Therapy Speak, pop psychology and therapeutic language
· Clinical terms such as trauma, trigger, toxic, narcissistic and gaslighting are used on Instagram and TikTok outside their technical definitions; up to 40 per cent of TikTok videos with the hashtag #trauma expand the term’s meaning.
· Therapy speak fulfils social functions: authority, identity, options for alliance, and visible self-description using therapeutic jargon.
· Pop psychology operates according to Bourdieu’s logic of symbolic conversion: psychological mindset is translated into social capital.
· Lukas Maher describes this in his book "Trigger, Trauma, Toxic": terms and concepts with a clinical background are greatly simplified online.
· Clinical psychotherapy warns: vague language hinders evidence-based treatment and devalues the experience of those seriously ill with post-traumatic stress disorder or other diagnoses.
· Health insurance companies, publishers and social media stabilise the linguistic order through content marketing and the self-help market.
· The destigmatisation of mental health is an achievement; the trap lies in the identity-based fixation on a pathologised self.
· Therapeutic approach: listen, take seriously, differentiate slowly without directly attacking the self-image, and explore vocabulary and signs together.
· Speaking publicly about ‘Therapy Speak’ is simultaneously its dismantling; legibility strips the practice of self-branding of its effect (méconnaissance).
· Clinics and everyday life must develop languages that are not mutually exclusive, but also not confused with one another.
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