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Key points
- Some people today employ psychology terms such as "abuse," "gaslighting," and "trauma" to convey their point.
- An early instance of pathologizing others was when psychiatrists publicly diagnosed presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
- People may have valid reasons for using psychology jargon, but overall it may diminish the quality of public discourse.
To be heard over today’s 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 feeding our dopamine addiction. To others it has a simpler name: hype.
Jessica Bennett presents the problem very cogently in a recent New York Times guest essay. She focuses on a particular strategy: hyping all setbacks or frustrations as “trauma,” and hyping every offense as “abuse” or “gaslighting.”
It’s an excellent essay and certainly worth reading. But the phenomenon goes well beyond Bennett’s many examples of clinical terms that pathologize the actions of others.
Poisoning the well
Pathologizing the others themselves has an even longer history. For one thing, it led to the 1973 Goldwater Rule, 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 1,200 American psychiatrists to wield psychiatric diagnosis as a weapon to attack presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
According to these doctors, Senator Goldwater didn’t merely hold offensive political views. He was “schizophrenic,” a “megalomaniac,” 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 — Goldwater won a defamation lawsuit against the publisher — the APA established the rule to save its members from further embarrassing themselves and their profession.
A tool (that seemed) too handy to set aside
Few challenged this prohibition in the 42 years before Donald Trump’s presidential run. Then it suddenly became important among certain mental health professionals not merely to slam Trump’s politics, values, and attitudes, but to declare them the product of a sick mind.
Alleging psychopathology, especially by credentialed experts, often proves a more powerful weapon than simple disagreement. In this case, however, it wasn’t powerful at all. Preaching to the choir about Trump’s mental ills merely invited counter-pathologizing of Trump’s opponents — not what these authors had in mind.
Of course, amplifying disapproval by adding psych jargon doesn’t require a mental health professional. (Nor is such jargon always, or mainly, critical. Therapy-speak is rampant for all kinds of reasons.) Historically, evildoers have been “monsters” — the word originally meant an infant born with birth defects, believe it or not — or “madmen.” Now reprehensible people are “narcissists” or “sociopaths,” especially on social media. They “gaslight,” “abuse,” and “love-bomb” the innocent. As Bennett writes, it’s a lot more powerful to call someone an abuser than to admit they hurt your feelings.
Winning by losing
A few years ago I wrote about “onedownmanship” — oneupmanship in reverse — 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 “race to the bottom” rewards greater hurt with greater attention and legitimacy.
Saying this risks blaming the victim. Indeed, many commenters assailed my post where I held that “psychopath” often serves as a vague epithet of disapproval. They said my view was “gaslighting,” and at least one suggested I might be a psychopath myself. (Psychology Today 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.
I do not mean to blame victims. Nor do I believe rhetorical misuse of psych jargon is premeditated or intentionally manipulative. I’m sure it feels self-justifying. And it simply works as a way to get one’s point across, to be heard above the din. That’s why people use it.
Why not use psych jargon as hype?
Nonetheless, drawbacks abound. Pathologizing others in public discourse is essentially an ad hominem argument, a logical fallacy. Popular terms such as “abuser” (and “racist” and “snowflake”) are personal putdowns, not valid arguments.
Psychiatric labels compound the problem by linking destructive stereotypes to named disorders. Whether Donald Trump may be a malignant narcissist or not matters less than continual cultural reminders that narcissists are dangerous, “toxic” people we need to beware and avoid.
Using psych jargon as hype also cheapens these otherwise useful terms (see “trauma creep”). If everyone who feels down or disappointed is “depressed,” how do we describe those who ponder suicide all day and haven’t showered in weeks? If a bad date is “traumatic,” what term do we use when someone is critically injured in a terrorist attack?
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
In a noisy restaurant (remember those?) everyone speaks louder to be heard. Yet this adds to the noise that all must speak over — a vicious cycle. The cacophony is no one’s fault, but everyone’s doing. Likewise, if it takes psych jargon and similar hype to attract an empathic public, can we blame those who use it? We can’t. The hype is no one’s fault, but everyone’s doing.
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’ll realize that overstated language conveys less information, not more.
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 “trauma?” Is an isolated act of disrespect “abuse?” Does all misbehavior reflect a psychiatric condition? Only if we say so.
©2022 Steven Reidbord MD. All rights reserved.
