Words by Amelia Abraham. Illustrations by Lynnie Z.

A few years ago, I began to notice a shift in the way that we talked about care, particularly self-care: the rise of “therapy speak”—language usually reserved for a psychologist’s office used in everyday conversations. Situations became “depressing” and people “anxiety-inducing” or “toxic”. Increasingly, “boundaries were crossed” and “needs were not met”. Freudian terminology had long ago permeated the mainstream—from the unconscious to the ego—but this was something new. We were talking about ordinary behaviours in a mishmash of confessional and clinical psycho-jargon that no longer really felt like jargon at all. It felt normal. 

At first, I wondered if those around me had become more introspective or analytical with age, or perhaps just a little more middle class. It’s true that several were now solvent enough to pay for long-term private therapists and talked about them all the time like waspy New Yorkers from a talky American movie. But then the internet told me that therapy speak was being used among people of all ages and backgrounds. Back in 2019, a friend pointed out how the word “trauma” had amassed almost 2 billion tags on TikTok and how therapists themselves were joining the app to share videos. “Shrinks demonstrate an anxiety relief technique to a trending Saweetie rap and wiggle their hips while explaining symptoms of dissociation,” explains an article in The New York Times, surveying the scene. 

While perhaps unexpected, something about this felt democratising, like more people had access to care that can be expensive or requires a long time spent on a waiting list. The accompanying rise of “affirmations” seemed like a positive shift, too. In dancer Donte Colley’s TikTok videos of “self-care housekeeping,” he danced as reaffirming mantras appeared on the screen. Watching the videos, they seemed to say: you don’t have to wait for someone to help you, you can help yourself, here, now. Still, I had mixed feelings. 

On one hand, it felt like therapy speak was fostering a culture of oversensitivity. Isn’t there such a thing as too many feelings swirling around? Whatever happened to a stiff upper lip? To borrow a term from self-help land itself, could we, to some extent, be “manifesting” our problems? (My grandparents always used to assure me that their generation “just got on with it”.) But, on the other hand, the rise of therapy speak seemed to foster a culture of insensitivity, encouraging the kind of cold and clinical language that lacks nuance or even basic humanity. Take, for example, phrases like “conscious uncoupling” or that increasingly popular interpersonal out of office: “sorry, I don’t have the capacity right now”. 

Like many of us, I wondered if therapy speak was helping to destigmatise mental illness, or conversely, whether overusing clinical language can somehow detract from the reality of it. Or whether such a distinction is irrelevant since isn’t mental health on a sliding scale anyway, like those forms you fill out in the doctors’ office where you circle your depression or anxiety level 0 through to 3? 

At some point, there appeared to be a backlash towards these linguistic shifts. It seemed to happen as therapy speak was used more visibly in activist circles, both online and off. It was and still is, I think, useful in discussions about who is expending what emotional labour or what constitutes burnout. But once language like “triggered” or “traumatised” proliferated among feminist, queer, and POC communities and progressives, its interlocutors were mocked by the right-wing, from newspapers to memes. Suddenly, anyone conflating identity politics with therapy speak was at risk of being labelled a “snowflake”. Here I think of the quintessentially Daily Mail headline: “Snowflakes are triggered by FULL STOPS”. 

Perhaps ironically, no one I personally know seemed to mind being called a “snowflake”; we were much more likely to be put off therapy speak by its all-pervasiveness or hearing it echoed back to us through advertising. See Lulu Lemon tweeting, “It’s OK to not be OK”, or Chipotle tweeting, “You should check in on someone today”. Therapy speak began to feel corporatised and icky in the same way as the language of empowerment. It became difficult to remember what came first, therapy speak or self-care capitalism. Or if one ever existed without the other.  

When the pandemic happened, it transformed the way we talked about care entirely. The pandemic changed things because it gave us all one big collective reason to feel scared, anxious, depressed, and traumatised. In that sense, it kind of further democratised therapy speak, or rather, it kind of made therapy speak just speak. More than once, I sat at a table (or on a friend Zoom) where someone would openly talk about how they felt depressed or hopeless, while everybody else nodded sagely in agreement, or at least in understanding. At the same time, the pandemic made some of us more alert to how we might have excluded certain people. 

As our privileges were stripped away, we began to experience what life might be like for people who had always lived without them. The pandemic highlighted, for example, the ways in which we have collectively overlooked immunocompromised people who require health and hygiene consciousness. Or people living with disabilities who had been denied the right to work or learn remotely. Hashtags like #highriskcovid19 drew attention to the unique experiences of some of these groups of people and how our language had historically harmed or ignored them, prompting us to talk about care more carefully. 

In the face of these realisations, as well as in the face of government incompetence, we built better infrastructures of community care. We joined telefriending services where we could call the elderly to check in with them, gave to food banks and homeless shelters. Economists wondered if
the pandemic would collapse a neoliberal system built obsessively on gains and privatisation, giving
way to a fairer or more equal system altogether. In
the short term, at least, a more altruistic economy flourished through mutual aid and peer support networks. Care had moved from something that we saw as the role of professionals or parents to something more of us could offer each other. In the end, thanks to the pandemic, we weren’t just talking about care more, we were giving more of it.

Recently, worrying about the implications of therapy speak seems a little less important. People do not seem to talk so much about boundaries now anyway—maybe because lockdown helped a lot of us better locate where our boundaries actually lie. We are more willing to turn down invitations and turn off our phones, say, or better value simple self-care rituals like a walk or a night in. Perhaps too, our problems have been put into perspective. When I was moaning about something trivial recently, my partner told me to stop talking about it because I was making it into a bigger issue than it was. I found that when I shut up, I stopped thinking about it and moved on. We can’t do that with all our problems, but I remembered that, sometimes, humanely telling someone you don’t care or that they shouldn’t care is a form of care in itself. I was reminded that in a post-therapy speak society that is quick to diagnose everything as a problem, expending less care in certain directions might give us the opportunity to direct it in another. 

When a friend recently went through peer support training from the NHS—a free course they offer non-NHS workers that helps you talk to friends in need, not just in therapy speak, but in simple
language that makes space for what they’re going through—I worried that it meant that we’re still doomed. I thought: what does it mean that we need training to talk to one other about our problems? Then I decided that her taking the class was probably a hopeful sign. A sign that over the next few years, we will learn from the pandemic and keep building a more caring culture as a form of resistance, as an antidote to neoliberal, corporatised, individualised times. 

Care and the language around it will continue to morph, especially in a future where we will rely more on telemedicine and AI therapy chatbots, with more time spent online. But maybe the future also looks more like my friend’s training, more peer-to-peer care—more “emotional support Whatsapp groups” and more alternative forms of care like affirmation memes or tarot card readings offered over social media. Maybe we will talk more earnestly about care but without falling back on cliches or bot-like responses. Of course, we can’t police language in the broader sense. It contorts and carries as it wants to. But we should watch it. We should pay attention to how we talk about care because it shows us where it is lacking, where we can plug gaps in the government’s provision of it, where we can talk more openly about those not receiving it. Ultimately, how we can care more.

This article features in Riposte #13 - The Care Issue. Click through to our shop to order your print copy.