{"id":1594,"date":"2022-02-07T10:20:31","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T18:20:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2022-04-04T20:43:18","modified_gmt":"2022-04-05T03:43:18","slug":"psychiatric-jargon-as-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/?p=1594","title":{"rendered":"Psych jargon as media hype"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To be heard over today\u2019s cacophony of voices, one needs a hook: a meme, a viral photo, a catchy phrase, a juicy zinger, a sound bite.  Speakers soon learn that overstimulated, desensitized attention spans require more and more goosing.  Some call this the attention economy<\/a> feeding our dopamine addiction<\/a>.  To others it has a simpler name: hype.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Bennett presents the problem very cogently in a recent New York Times<\/em> guest essay<\/a>.  She focuses on a particular strategy: hyping all setbacks or frustrations as \u201ctrauma,\u201d and hyping every offense as \u201cabuse\u201d or \u201cgaslighting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an excellent essay and certainly worth reading.  But the phenomenon goes well beyond Bennett\u2019s many examples of clinical terms that pathologize the actions of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poisoning the well<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Pathologizing the others themselves has an even longer history.  For one thing, it led to the 1973 Goldwater Rule<\/a>, which (still) forbids members of the American Psychiatric Association from offering psychiatric opinions about public figures.  The APA created this rule because in 1964 a provocateur magazine publisher persuaded nearly 1200 American psychiatrists to wield psychiatric concepts as weapons to attack presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to these doctors, Senator Goldwater didn\u2019t merely hold offensive political views.  He was \u201cschizophrenic,\u201d a \u201cmegalomaniac,\u201d and plenty of other bad names casually borrowed from the professional literature.  Since this flood of pseudoscience reflected more poorly on the psychiatrists than on Goldwater himself \u2014 Goldwater won a defamation lawsuit against the publisher \u2014 the APA established the rule to save its members from further embarrassing themselves and their profession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A tool (that seemed) too handy to set aside<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Few challenged this prohibition in the 42 years before Donald Trump\u2019s presidential run.  Then it suddenly became<\/a> important<\/a> among certain mental health professionals not merely to slam Trump\u2019s politics, values, and attitudes, but to declare them the product of a sick mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alleging psychopathology, especially by credentialed experts, often proves a more powerful weapon than simple disagreement.\u00a0 In this case, however, it wasn\u2019t powerful at all.\u00a0 Preaching to the choir about Trump\u2019s mental ills merely invited counter-pathologizing of Trump\u2019s opponents \u2014 clearly not what these authors had in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, amplifying disapproval by adding psych jargon doesn\u2019t require a mental health professional.  (Nor is such jargon always, or mainly, critical.  Therapy-speak is rampant<\/a> for all kinds of reasons.)  Historically, evildoers have been \u201cmonsters\u201d \u2014 the word originally meant<\/a> an infant born with birth defects, believe it or not \u2014 or \u201cmadmen.\u201d  Now reprehensible people are \u201cnarcissists\u201d or \u201csociopaths,\u201d especially on social media.  They \u201cgaslight,\u201d \u201cabuse,\u201d and \u201clove-bomb\u201d the innocent.  As Bennett writes, it\u2019s a lot more powerful to call someone an abuser than to admit they hurt your feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Winning by losing<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago I wrote about \u201conedownmanship<\/a>\u201d \u2014 oneupmanship in reverse \u2014 as a method to win arguments by positioning oneself as the more victimized party.  Just as social media algorithms guide users to more and more extreme content, our victimization \u201crace to the bottom\u201d rewards greater hurt with greater attention and legitimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saying this risks blaming the victim.  Indeed, many commenters assailed my post<\/a> where I held that \u201cpsychopath\u201d often serves as a vague epithet of disapproval.  They said my view was \u201cgaslighting,\u201d and at least one suggested I might be a psychopath myself.  (Psychology Today<\/em> has since removed comments from all posts.)  In other words, unhappy commenters employed popular pathologizing terms to discredit me for failing to honor the terms of their victimhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do not mean to blame victims.  Nor do I believe rhetorical misuse of psych jargon is premeditated or intentionally manipulative.  I\u2019m sure it feels self-justifying.  And it simply works as a way to get one\u2019s point across, to be heard above the din.  That\u2019s why people use it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why not use psych jargon as hype?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, drawbacks abound.  Pathologizing others in public discourse is essentially an ad hominem<\/em> argument, a logical fallacy.  Popular terms such as \u201cabuser\u201d (and \u201cracist\u201d and \u201csnowflake\u201d) are personal putdowns, not valid arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psychiatric labels compound the problem by linking destructive stereotypes to named disorders.  Whether Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist matters less than continual cultural reminders that narcissists are dangerous, \u201ctoxic” people we need to beware and avoid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using psych jargon as hype also cheapens these otherwise useful terms (see \u201ctrauma creep<\/a>\u201d).  If everyone who feels down or disappointed is \u201cdepressed,\u201d how do we describe those who ponder suicide all day and haven\u2019t showered in weeks?  If a bad date is \u201ctraumatic,\u201d what term do we use when someone is critically injured in a terrorist attack?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t hate the player, hate the game<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In a noisy restaurant (remember those?) everyone speaks louder to be heard.  Yet this adds to the noise that all must speak over \u2014 a vicious cycle.  The cacophony is no one\u2019s fault, but everyone\u2019s doing.  Likewise, if it takes psych jargon and similar hype to attract an empathic public, can we blame those who use it?  We can\u2019t.  The hype is no one\u2019s fault, but everyone\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, both situations eventually self-correct.  Diners learn that a noisy restaurant is not a good place for serious conversation.  They go elsewhere for earnest talk, and as a side-effect they stop feeding the vicious cycle.  In like fashion, eventually we\u2019ll realize that overstated language conveys less information, not more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hype, of the psych-speak variety and otherwise, will one day strike us as florid, perhaps foppish, and in any case less compelling.  It will self-correct.  We can hasten that day by noting when rhetoric is inflated for effect.  Is frustration or disappointment really \u201ctrauma?\u201d  Is an isolated act of disrespect \u201cabuse?\u201d Does all misbehavior reflect a psychiatric condition?  Only if we say so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo by Verena Yunita Yapi<\/a> on Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hype cuts through the noise to reach a jaded public. It’s common to use psychological terms, especially related to trauma and abuse. What are the pitfalls? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[84,86,85],"class_list":["post-1594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-psychiatric-diagnosis","tag-language","tag-social-media","tag-trauma","odd"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1594"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1612,"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions\/1612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.stevenreidbordmd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}