We are surrounded by what some now refer to as therapy-speak. From HR seminars to dating advice videos on TikTok, references to “trauma bonds,” “emotional boundaries,” and “anxious attachment” have become a fixture of popular culture. However, a new academic paper warns that this widespread cultural fluency in simplified and decontextualized therapeutic language, often marketed as self-help, may be undermining collective well-being.
In the European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling, researchers Arturo Bandinelli and Iris Aleida Pinzón Arteaga argue that the rise of therapy-speak is a defining feature of the “therapeutic turn.” This turn, they write, refers not to depth-oriented psychotherapy itself, but to the broader cultural trend of using therapeutic frameworks to individualize social suffering. The paper distinguishes between the nuanced, often self-critical traditions of psychoanalysis and the instrumentalized language of therapy now embedded in reality TV, corporate wellness programs, and online influencer culture.
Bandinelli, a London-based filmmaker, researcher, and psychoanalyst-in-training, and Pinzón Arteaga, a psychologist and doctoral researcher in sociology at the University at Albany, examine how therapeutic discourse has become a dominant cultural lens for making sense of pain, struggle, and social dislocation. Their work draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis and psychosocial theory to critique how this discourse circulates beyond the clinic and contributes to what they call the privatization of suffering.
Bandinelli and Pinzón Arteaga define the therapeutic turn as a cultural shift in which “psychotherapeutic discourses are employed to individualise suffering and neutralise symbolic contradictions.” In their view, this trend has transformed therapy into a tool for managing social unease rather than confronting its root causes.
As a counterpoint, they propose what they call “a psychotherapy against the Therapeutic Turn” as a form of practice that resists the cultural pull toward the individual self as the locus of explanation and instead questions the authority of therapeutic knowledge when it is used to pacify discomfort or depoliticize distress.
“In this respect,” they write, “our contribution may be inscribed within the broader attempt to build a critical corpus within psychotherapy,” one that pays close attention to “growing state influences on, and the ideological cooptation of, talking therapies.”
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Great. More research criticizing therapy-speak while engaging in therapy-speak.
Why can’t researchers talk like normal people?
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It’s meant to be confusing to the masses, that’s why the medical community utilizes Latin and “therapy-speak,” instead of English.
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When I was little, I imagined them sitting on the toilet. It’s time I go back to doing that.
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“They invoke the Möbius strip to illustrate this idea. Just as a Möbius strip has only one side, the subject is both shaped by and resistant to the social order. Suffering, in this topology, occurs at the seam between language and what it cannot express.”
To begin with, a Möbius strip, even in the standard mainstream interpretation of a two dimensional something, has two sides (as if a piece of paper only has two), but it being already able to be twisted has to have depth (or to even be a piece of paper as well) so it’s at least three dimensional. And being used for thought would be at least four dimensional, here.
Listing suffering as something in a row of topics…….
Would one go to a therapist who then decides: “shall we talk about their suffering, or their cognitive abilities, or their……?” I think there’s already quite a block there. Or what would happen would a therapist ask a patient: “Well, shall we talk about your suffering, or the problems with your cognitive abilities, or maybe your emotional understanding or impact?”
Like WOW dude, I’m not a text book……!?
Would people take on the verbiage of psychiatry, and use it for themselves, and find out themselves what’s going on, this remains something different than having a “legal” diagnosis put down: what used to be on paper now probably is digital, and stored; and so what’s the difference?
I don’t know the statistics, would one look at EVERYONE using these common phrases, whether that helps them find out what’s going on and escaping the predatory behavior of what so often goes on in psychiatry, but these terms are so common now that I think everyone uses such as “depressed” or even “schizophrenic” or “psychotic” or “ADHD” or “autistic” about themselves at times.
I’m not saying that’s the predominant side of it, that then they figure it out on their own in a more natural manner, which one would HOPE is going on, just that there are more than one, also more than two……
And a lot of people use “Yankee Doodle” language…….
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Another thinly veiled political rant. Thanks, MIA.
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“Not knowing”? Let’s embrace confusion and call it a strategy.
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They are spot on. Thanks for being on top of this.
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On top of what? A cross-eyed camel?
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Wow. Replacing therapists who act like they know everything with therapists who act like they know nothing.
It doesn’t get any nuttier than this.
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Don’t worry, I can feel your moanings and your wails – they are inside of me, are my suffering. Don’t worry – I know your hatred well: it animates my words, my writings, and my growlings back to you every day. And I would pillage and plunder Mothers and Fathers. And I would condemn whole civilizations to hell. In the night I am the night, and the winds that pass through me are my will. But you cannot and you will not stop this will. It is cut fine like a knife. The truth is gathering force and sweeping all things along with it like a tsunami Nothing will escape, and your moans and your cries and your pain are the fire in my heart. There is no cost I will not bare. The fire in the flames of hell can caress like a long lost lover.
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Let’s be realistic. “Therapy-Speak,” should be properly called, debunked DSM ‘bible’ stigmatization / defamation.
Because continued use of the debunked DSM results in “a privatization of distress, where suffering is interpreted as a signal of individual dysfunction.” Well, in my personal case, my distress was caused by the societal dysfunction, that resulted in my – and the entire world’s – legitimate distress at the distressing 9/11/2001 event.
I guess that’s called political abuse of psychology and psychiatry, in America, huh?
If, “Their goal is not to reject therapy altogether, but to propose a form of practice that breaks with the individualizing and depoliticizing tendencies of the therapeutic turn,” then the psychologists need to break from use of their “invalid” psychiatric DSM “bible” … and stop functioning as nothing more than funnels into the “BS” psychiatric forced drugging, iatrogenic illness creating, system.
“More than simply naming problems, therapy-speak [DSM stigmatization-speak] provides tools to manage contradictions without confronting them.” Especially, when it comes to covering up child abuse, which has become, by DSM design, the number one actual function of both the DSM “bible” billing psych industries.
Therapy does “carry unacknowledged harms, especially for those experiencing mild to moderate distress” or none, thus the psych industries should learn to live, and let live, and leave innocent others alone. (It was less than a year ago that I finally got a criminal computer hacking psychologist, who I refused to hire, hopefully forever, out of my computer and phone.)
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