The best article I've seen in the New Yorker for some time by staff writer Katy Waldman.
For Lori Gottlieb, the author of the book “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,” the downsides of casual therapy-speak are more straightforward. “I want to be clear that there’s no reason why people who are not professional psychologists should be expected to use these terms correctly,” she told me. “But there’s a lot of inaccuracy.” Error can be introduced via colloquialism—“O.C.D.” for “organized”—or the actual misconstrual of a word’s meaning. (Someone mistaking “conflict” for “abuse” or labelling you a “gaslighter” because you’ve expressed an opinion that they don’t agree with.) As philosophers from Michel Foucault to Peter Conrad have observed, medical vocabulary lifts up the speaker—claiming that your intrusive neighbor has “borderline personality disorder” cloaks you in authority while pathologizing him. Using these words as bludgeons strips them of complexity; the problem with armchair therapy, or what we now might call “Instagram therapy,” is that it can transform a “deeply relational, nuanced, contextual process,” Gottlieb said, into something “ego-directed, as if the point were always, ‘I’m the most important person and I need to take care of myself.’ ”
