Therapy speak

Join us as we create a more peaceful, kind, and compassionate world.

Today, when every feeling becomes a diagnosis, the problem with self-diagnosis and TherapySpeak.

TherapySpeak has penetrated our daily lexicon.

What's the upside and downside of it? Today, we're talking about the rise of TherapySpeak among girls and young women.

specifically, and how diagnosis, labels, social media, and therapy culture can sometimes help us understand our pain, but can also make it harder to understand ourselves.

My guest, Dr. Suzanne Garfunkel Crowell, offers a nuanced look at this complicated shift.

It's Labor Day, and ahead on this Monday, September 7th, could the key to success be knowing when to say I quit? We're talking to journalist and author Lindsay Cross about her new book, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out.

Then, we've all heard so-called therapy speak buzzwords, like gaslighting and trauma, but all that could be harmful to young girls.

We'll tell you what parents can do about it.

Plus, it's Monday, and David Begnaud is continuing his Dear David series, featuring stories from viewers.

[laughs]

... thank you very much

Well, a lot of people use so-called therapy speak these days, words like trauma-

Ah

And here to help us today is psychiatrist Dr. Suzanne Garfinkel-Crowell.

who has written the absolutely brilliant book, Girlhood Translated, Understanding Girls in the Age of Therapy Speak and Self-Diagnosis.

Now, Suzanne has spent her career in the room with teenage girls, and she's noticed a change in the last 10 years, which is why she felt compelled to write this book.

Now, we're going to talk about why a diagnosis can feel like relief, even when it isn't necessarily accurate, why girls specifically have been psychiatry's go-to patient for over a And what that history has to do with your own daughter today.

And that's this sort of mental health language explosion.

Can you explain how girls are using this language to express who they are? Sure.

I noticed that girls were starting to speak in a very different way in this language of therapy speak.

So, for example, 15 years ago when I started my practice, people would come in and talk about their problems, right? A teenage girl would say, you know, I'm really not getting along with my mom or school has become really challenging or I've been feeling bad about myself.

We need to talk about the scandalous award.

Ah, Felipe, the reigning king of weaponized incompetence and fraudulent therapy speak.

The worst.

During that same group game, the cast overwhelmingly votes Felipe most likely to engage in scandalous behavior.

He's a child.

He storms upstairs, sulks in the bedroom like a toddler who got his iPad taken away, and cries that everyone is perceiving him maliciously.

This is where the therapy speak comes in, and it is a dangerous trend in modern dating.

He sits Tori down, puts on his sad face, and says, I have PTSD from past relationships where partners were ashamed of me.

back to what I was talking about earlier.

I mean, these mental health terms and therapy speak that's being put out there by these influencers are— I mean, if I have any more patients coming in saying, I think she's borderline or I think he's bipolar or a narcissist, I always say the same thing.

Why do you think that? Where did you get the information from? And it's, you know, nine times out of ten.

It's an influencer.